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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



Studies in the 

Sermon on the Mount 



By 

OSWALD CHAMBERS 

Author of "Bible Psychology" "The Cure 

of t Souls/' etc. Principal of London 

Bible Training College. 



"We may all be disciples; why should we not be scholars of the one 
Teacher? Come, let Him lure thee— give up all other teachers and 
hear this Teacher sent from God." 

J. PARKER 



God's Rcvivali6t Press 
Cincinnati, Ohio. 



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COPYEIGHTED, 1915, 
BY GOD'S EEVIVALIST OFFICE. 



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QEC -6 1915 



FOREWORD. 



In his Sixth Study our author says, "Jesus warns 
His disciples to test preachers and teachers by their 
fruit. There are two ways of testing by fruit — one 
by the fruit in the life of the preacher, and the other 
is by the fruit in the life of the doctrine." It is a 
genuine joy to be able to apply these touchstones of 
character and teaching to the life and words of Oswald 
Chambers. 

It was the writer's rare privilege to be in the same 
home with him and to sit under his ministry for a 
number of months; to see him daily and to find in 
him a patient counselor, an exemplary as well as 
trustworthy teacher, and a Christlike friend. The 
following words are none too vividly descriptive of 
this modern prophet teacher : 

"Who never sold the truth to -serve the hour, 
Nor paltered with eternal God for power, 
Who let the turbid stream of rumor flow 
Thro' either babbling world high or low; 
Whose life is work, whose language rife 
With rugged maxims hewn from life, 
Who never spoke against a foe" 

And as to the second test proposed, "the fruit. . . 
of the doctrine" — will there be found in all the 
Church of Christ of today one whose words are mce 
weighty with spiritual values? "But," says some 



simple soul, "I don't understand him." The more 
is the pity. Leave then the evening newspaper, the 
book of religious wonder-tales, the high-flown writings 
"watered" with adjectives, but empty of thought or 
power, and read these pages again and again until the 
truth " soaks" through to your innermost conscious- 
ness. There is about us a flood of profession, but a 
failure in possession; a torrent of criticism for those 
who "follow not us," but a trickling rivulet of sound 
advice to ourselves. To heed the words of our Lord's 
Sermon on the Mount as interpreted by Oswald 
Chambers will transform holiness people into holy 
people, and faithless verbosity into Christian humility. 
Unto which glorious result, God speed the day! 

—J. F. K. 



CONTENTS. 

Page 

Foreword 3 

Study Number One. Introductory 7 

Study Number Two. Matthew Five 21 

Study Number Three. Matthew Five 37 

Study Number Four. Matthew Five and Six 59 

Study Number Five. Matthew Seven 79 

Study Number Six. Matthew Seven 103 



Study Number One 



N. B. (1) Introductory note on the Gospel according to St. 
Matthew and St. Luke respectively. 
(2) The student is advised to get a copy of Dr. Gore's 
"The Seraron on the Mount." 

ST. MATTHEW: COLLECTION OF DISCOURSES. 

1. Address to the Twelve. 

Matthew 5 : 1-16, 39-42, 44-48 ; 7:1-6; 12 : 
15-17. 

2. Address on Prayer. 

Matthew 6 : 9-15 ; 7 : 7-11. 

3. Answer to a Theological Question. 

Matthew 7 : 13, 14 ; 8 : 11, 12. 

4. Address on Worldly-mindedness. 

Matthew 6 : 19-34. 

5. Address in the Synagogue of Capernaum. 

Matthew 5 : 17-39, 43 ; 6 : 1-8, 16-18. 

ST. LUKE : CHRONOLOGICAL DIVISIONS. 

1. Address to the Twelve. 

Luke 6 : 20 : 20-28, 41-49 ; 11 : 32. 

2. Address on Prayer. 

Luke 11:1-13. 

3. Answer to a Theological Question. 

Luke 13 : 23-30. 

4. Address on "Worldly-mindedness. 

Luke 12 : 13-34. 

5. Address in the Synagogue of Capernaum. 

Luke 4: 31-37; (Mark 1: 21-28). 



STUDY NUMBER ONE. 

In order to understand the Sermon on the 
Mount, it is necessary to know the mind of the 
Preacher, and this knowledge can be gained by 
anyone who will receive the Holy Spirit. (Luke 
ii : 13; John 20: 22\ Acts 19: 2.) 

Beware of placing our Lord Jesus as a teach- 
er first instead of a Savior. We must first know 
Him as a Savior before His teachings have any 
meaning for us, or before they have any other 
meaning than that of an ideal which leads to de- 
spair. There are some people who take up this 
attitude : "I do not believe there is any necessity 
to preach an atonement through Jesus Christ, I 
do not believe it is necessary to say He died for 
our sins, I believe that Jesus is a teacher only." 
That attitude is very prevalent to-day, but it is 
a very absurd as well as dangerous one, for if 
He was only a teacher, His teaching would pro- 
duce despair. Fancy coming to men and women 
with defective lives and defiled hearts and wrong 

9 



io The Sermon on the Mount. 

mainsprings and telling them to be pure in heart ! 
What would be the good of His giving us an ideal 
that we could not possibly come near? we are 
happier without knowing it. If Jesus is only 
a teacher, then all He can do is to tantalise us, to 
erect a standard we cannot attain to; but if we 
know Him first as Savior, if we are born again 
of the Spirit of God, we know that He did not 
come to teach us only, but that He came to make 
us what He teaches we should be. 

The Gospel according to St. Matthew, in its 
original state in the early Church, was in two 
sections. One section was composed of five 
great discourses of our Lord's with no historical 
narrative at all. This was transcribed by Mat- 
thew himself. The second section has the five 
discourses fitted into the historical narratives of 
our Lord's life. The latter was compiled by a 
student-evangelist of Matthew's, and it is this 
latter Gospel that we know. 

Matthew wrote his Gospel according to topics ; 
Luke, a cultured physician, an evangelist and dis- 
ciple of Paul's, wrote his Gospel in the perfect 
manner of the Greek historians, so that the stu- 
dent who wants to know where the various teach- 
ings of Jesus are to be placed in our Lord's life 
must turn to Luke's Gospel. 



Study Number One. ii 



*Wt4i 



"The Sermon on the Mount" is the title given 
by Matthew to a collection of discourses by our 
Lord, only one of which was literally preached 
on the mountain, the others were preached in the 
mountainous district. The evangelists Mat- 
thew, Peter, Paul and John took incidents out of 
the life of our Lord on which they based their 
doctrines, and the four Gospels are simply the 
records of their preaching under the guidance 
of the Holy Spirit. It sounds very precarious 
to us to say that it was all trusted to memory and 
oral transmission, but when we remember there 
was a kind of curse given by the rabbis to anyone 
who put anything in writing, and if a student in 
a rabbinical school made a slip in memory he was 
supposed to be worthy of death, it alters our too 
hasty first conclusions about the matter. These 
early disciples were brought up in that school, 
and when Paul talks about the "deposit" that 
Timothy had, this is what he is alluding to. They 
were all trained to retain accurate details and de- 
scriptions of our Lord's life; and in the year 62 
or 65 Matthew wrote his Gospel. 

The four Gospels are four contrasted views 
of our Lord's life, not contradictory views. The 
astute mind behind the Gospels is not a human 
mind at all, but the Holy Ghost. "Holy men 



12 The Sermon on the Mount. 

wrote as they were moved by the Spirit of God." 
A "harmony of the Gospels" is a rather mistaken 
idea; harmony must imply discord as well as ac- 
cord. The very same principle holds in under- 
standing the unity of the Gospels as in under- 
standing our Lord's teachings, viz., a personal 
knowledge of the mind of the Lord, which can he 
obtained by receiving the Holy Spirit. Peter 
says that holy men wrote as they were moved, he 
did not say holy machines. You will find that 
God the Holy Ghost instead of effacing the indi- 
viduality of these men did exactly the opposite, He 
lifted their personality to a point of "white heat," 
so to speak, and used it as the means of present- 
ing the Gospel of God. The more you brood 
over that line of things the more you will be able 
to discard the cheap and hasty criticism which is 
honeycombing so much of the teaching nowadays. 
You will find as many points in the Gospel that 
won't fit into another as you find points that will. 
The word we need is not harmony in the Gospels, 
but unity, and the unity is by the Holy Ghost. 

( i ) Address to the Twelve. 

When our Lord ordained twelve men out of 
the multitude that followed Him He preached to 
them what we have in Matthew 5 and 7, and He 
began by saying, "Blessed are," and then He 



Study Number One:. 13 

must have staggered them by what followed. 
They were to be blessed in every particular which 
they had been taught from their earliest child- 
hood was a curse. The statements of Jesus seem 
so wonderfully simple, but in reality they are like 
spiritual torpedoes, they explode and burst in the 
unconscious mind, and they come up to our con- 
scious mind and we say, "What a startling state- 
ment that is I" Our Lord was talking to Jews, 
and the Jews believed, down to their joints and 
marrow, that the sign of the blessing of God was 
material prosperity in every shape and form, and 
Jesus says, "Blessed are ye" for exactly the op- 
posite. *4 

We must remember that Jesus wrote nothing, 
He spoke everything, and to look upon His teach- 
ings as a written act of Parliament is absurd, 
and to look upon His statements as isolated texts 
to be mechanically followed is equally misleading. 
Our Lord expects that these statements of His 
will be carried out in the lives of these men in the 
power of the Spirit He is to give them. There 
are two ways of looking at the Sermon on the 
Mount: a number of teachers to-day say that it 
was a forecast of what is going to be during the 
Millennium and it has no application whatever to 
us now. There are others who say that it has 



14 The Sermon on the Mount. 

only an application to us now and has no reference 
to any other time. Now both those views are 
right, but either alone is wrong. In this present 
dispensation, Jesus says the kingdom of God is 
inside men, and men are called upon to live out 
His Spirit and His teaching in an age that will 
not recognize Him. That spells limitation and 
very often disaster. In the next dispensation 
the kingdom of God will be established outside 
as well as inside men. These two points of view 
are always put together in the New Testament. 

(2) Address on Prayer. 

Our Lord begins His teaching about prayer 
with a little playful irony in which He tells 
them to watch their motives (Matt. 6:5), 
"Why do you want to pray? Do you 
want to be known as a praying man? Well, 
verily that is your reward, you will be 
known as a praying man, but there is no more to 
it, there is no answer to your prayer." The next 
thing He told them was to keep a secret relation- 
ship between themselves and God (Matt. 6:6), 
and in verse 7 He told them not to rely on their 
own earnestness when praying. These three 
statements of Jesus, which are so familiar to us, 
are revolutionary. Call a halt one moment and 



Study Number One:. 15 

ask yourself, "Why do I want to pray, what is 
my motive ? Have I a personal, secret relation- 
ship to God that nobody knows but myself ? And 
what is my method when I pray, am I really rely- 
ing on God or on my own earnestness ?" These 
sayings of Jesus go to the very root of all pray- 
ing. The majority of us make the blunder of 
depending on our own earnestness and not on 
God at all. It is confidence in Him. (1 John 
5 : 14, 15.) All our fuss, all our earnestness, all 
our "gifts of prayer" are not the slightest atom 
of use to Jesus Christ, He pays no attention to 
them. Our Lord gave His disciples the pattern 
prayer and supplied in that prayer their want of 
ideas and words and faith. Then He taught 
them the prayer of patience. Our Lord's in- 
struction about patience in prayer conveys this 
lesson: "If you are right with God, and God 
delays the manifested answer to your prayer, 
don't misjudge Him, don't think of Him as an 
unkind friend, or an unnatural father, or an un- 
just judge, but keep at it. Your prayer will 
certainly be answered," says Jesus, "for everyone 
that asks receives," and "men ought always to 
pray and not faint." Your Heavenly Father will 
explain it all one day, He cannot just now because 
He is developing your character. 



1 6 The: Sermon on the Mount. 

(3) Answer to a Theological Question. 
Our Lord in His answers very rarely, if ever, 

appears to deal with the questions asked. In 
Luke 13 a very devout, pious individual asks Him 
if there be many saved or few, and Jesus gave him 
a reply in an Oriental proverb, the effect of which 
is, "See that your own feet are on the right path." 
At another time, the disciples said, in a really ear- 
nest mood, "Lord, increase our faith," and Jesus 
quoted them an Oriental proverb about a grain of 
mustard seed and a mountain, which if you watch 
the setting, undoubtedly conveys this: "Get 
personally related to me, and lack of faith will 
never bother you." Whenever we lack faith, it 
is simply that we do not trust Him; faith must 
be the result of a personal understanding. Our 
Lord's answers seem at first to evade the point, 
but instead of evading it, He goes underneath the 
questions and puts something in that will solve 
every question. He never answers our shallow 
questions, but He deals with the great, uncon- 
scious need that made them arise. One class of 
questions our Lord never answered, those that 
come from the head, the reason being that no 
question from the head is ever original. 

(4) Address on Worldly-mindedness. 
Our Lord in this discourse and in many others, 



Study Number One. 17 

was strong on the necessity of a line of demarca- 
tion between worldly-mindedness and spirit-mind- 
edness while we are in the world. We are most 
of us certain that we can serve two masters with 
a little skill and tact, but we sooner or later come 
to the conclusion that Jesus knows best. (There 
is all the difference between Heaven and Hell in 
that simple phrase, "Jesus knows best." Think 
what it means in your personal life, in your busi- 
ness life. Some of us are uncommonly like the 
disciples when Jesus was with them in the fish- 
ing boat, they thought in effect, "He is a carpen- 
ter, and doesn't know anything about fishing; 
He can go to sleep, He does not know anything 
about managing boats ;"but when the storm comes 
on, Jesus is the only one who can manage the 
boat, the fishermen are terrified out of their wits. 
It is a great moment in a man's life when he 
realizes that Jesus knows more about his business 
than he does himself.) 

Take our attitude to our Lord's statement that 
everyone that asks receives, the majority of us 
think we believe it, but our attitude really is, "I'll 
ask, but it may not be His will to answer," mean- 
ing that I have no confidence in Jesus further than 
my common sense allows me to go. We call our- 
selves Christians, but where do we place Jesus? 
We limit Him on the right hand and on the left, 



18 The Sermon on the Mount. 

by trusting to ourselves. The man or woman 
who trusts Jesus in a definite, practical way ought 
to be freer than anyone else to do his or her busi- 
ness; free from fret and worry, they can go 
with absolute certainty into the daily life, 

Jesus also taught that if men were to be spir- 
itual, they must sacrifice the natural, that the 
only ground of the spiritual is on the basis of the 
sacrifice of the natural. One of the greatest 
principles — which we do not seem to grasp, but 
which was very evident in our Lord's life — is that 
the natural life is neither moral nor immoral. I 
make it moral or immoral. Jesus says the nat- 
ural life is meant for sacrifice, we can give it 
as a gift to God, that is the way to become spirit- 
ual. Jesus says if we do not do that, we must 
barter the spiritual. That is where Adam failed, 
he refused to sacrifice the natural life and make 
it spiritual by obeying God's voice in it, conse- 
quently he sinned, the sin of his right to himself. 
If we say, "I like this natural life, I do not want 
to be a saint, I do not want to sacrifice the natural 
life for the spiritual," then Jesus says you must 
barter the spiritual. It is not a punishment, it 
is an eternal principle. If you are going to be 
spiritual, you must barter the natural, sacrifice it. 
Spirituality is not a sweet tendency towards piety 



Study Number One. 19 

in people who have not enough life in them to be 
bad; spirituality is the possession of the Holy 
Spirit of God which is, as it were, masculine in 
its strength, and that will make the most corrupt 
twisted,. sin-stained life spiritual if He be obeyed 

(5) Address in the Synagogue. 

Jesus distinctly says here that He is the mean- 
ing and the fulfillment of all the old command- 
ments, and if any man says it does not matte 
whether you heed those commandments or not 
Jesus says that He condemns him. If the old 
commandments were difficult, our Lord's princi 
pies are fathoms deeper and more difficult. He 
actually says that unless the men who were Hi r - 
disciples exceeded all the good doings of the good 
people Who are not His disciples, they will in no 
case enter the kingdom of Heaven. Think oi 
the best men and women you know who have 
never received the Spirit of God and who make 
no profession — they are upright, sterling, noble 
and Jesus says in effect, "If you have received 
my Spirit and are my disciples, you have to ex- 
ceed everything they do and are, or you will neve- 
see the kingdom of Heaven." Instead of the 
criticism of Christians being wrong, it is abso 
lutely right ; we have to produce our goods up to 



2o The Sermon on the Mount. 

and have the life in us that Jesus said we would 
sample. If we are born again of the Holy Ghost, 
have by means of His cross, we have to show it 
by the way we talk, the way we act and transact 
our business. 

The teaching in the Sermon on the Mount 
produces despair in the natural man, the one thing 
Jesus wants it to do, because immediately we get 
to despair we come to Jesus Christ like paupers, 
and are willing to receive from Him. "Blessed are 
the paupers in spirit" — that is the very first prin- 
ciple of the kingdom. As long as we have some 
conceited, self-righteous notion of our own — "Oh, 
yes, I can do this" — God has to allow us to go on 
until we break our ignorance over some obstacle, 
then we realize that, after all, Jesus knew best — 
"Blessed are the poor in spirit." It is receiving 
all the way along. 

Jesus spoke these things openly to all men, 
not to a special clique, and if they are binding on 
any man they are binding on all equally. 

This is a brief introduction to our more de- 
tailed study of the Sermon on the Mount. Pray 
that God's Spirit will illuminate these studies to 
you. 



Study Number Two 

MATTHEW FIVE. 

A. DIVINE DISPROPORTION. 

1. The "Mines" of God. 

Luke 6:20-26. 

2. The Motive of Godliness. 

Matthew 5 : 11, 12. 

B. DIVINE DISADVANTAGE. 

1. Concentrated Service. 

Matthew 5:13. 

2. Conspicuous Setting. 

Matthew 5:14-16. 

C. DIVINE DECLARATION. 

1. His Mission. 

Matthew 5:20. 

2. His Message. 

Matthew 5 : 20. 

N. B. A working exposition of the subconscious mind will be 
given in this- lecture. 



STUDY NUMBER TWO 

Matthew 5. 

We will take the note at the foot of the outline 
first. N. B. Every mind has two compart- 
ments : a conscious and an unconscious compart- 
ment. Subconscious simply means under con- 
sciousness. The things we hear and read slip 
away from our memory; we say, they do not 
really, they go into the unconscious mind. The 
work of the Spirit of God in a Christian is to 
bring back into our conscious mind the things 
that are stored in the subconscious. So in study- 
ing the Bible never go on the line that because 
you do not understand what you are reading just 
now it will be of no use ; you find the habit of Bible 
study is to store the mind with Bible knowledge, 
and then perhaps after years when you come 
across something in your circumstances, the 
Spirit of God will bring back to your conscious 
mind something you never remembered you had, 
and you say, "I wonder wherever that came 
from!" 

23 



24 The Sermon on the Mount. 

Always bear in mind this twofold aspect of 
the mind. There is nothing supernatural or 
marvellous in it in the sense of being uncanny, 
it is simply a knowledge of how God has made us. 
So it is foolish to estimate only by what we con- 
sciously understand at the time ; we may not see 
any meaning in it for our lives, but if we store it 
away the Spirit of God will bring it back to our 
remembrance. 

The Sermon on the Mount lays down the 
principles at the basis of our Lord's kingdom, and 
it is by these principles, which are purposely 
veiled as laws and conduct, that we understand 
the nature of the Kingdom. A principle is some- 
thing that explains, and the principles of the Ser- 
mon on the Mount explain the character of our 
Lord's kingdom. It is by these principles alone 
that we understand His kingdom, but when it 
comes to personal conduct we find 1 instantly God 
veils them. 

The two methods of applying these principles 
to the conduct of individual Christians to-day — 
both of which are wrong — are first, the lax 
method, which makes out that these principles 
are mere poetry and nothing more. The other 
method is the literal one whereby the statements 
are applied literally. The first method makes 



Study Number Two. 25 

out that society, as it is, is all right; the latter 
method makes out that it is all rotten. The one 
abiding method of interpretation is the Spirit of 
Jesus Christ in the heart of a believer bringing 
His principles to apply in the particular circum- 
stances in which he is placed. (See Rom. 12 :2.) 
The methods we have mentioned are dodges to 
get away from the sternness of Jesus Christ's re- 
quirements. If the Sermon on the Mount is to 
be applied literally, then any fool can do that, we 
do not need to be born again to do that. But 
Jesus Christ insists that if any man is going to 
partake of the character of His kingdom, he must 
have His nature, all we understand by being born 
again and sanctified. Then we have the re- 
sponsibility, God does not take it, we have the 
responsibility of walking in the light and applying 
His principles to our circumstances. The whole 
thing is put in a nutshell by the apostle Paul: 
"Be renewed in the spirit of your mind, that you 
may prove what the will of God is, the thing that 
is acceptable and right and perfect." 

A. Divine Disproportion. (Matt. 5: 1-12.) 

( 1 ) The "Mines" of God. (Luke 6 120-26. ) 

(2) The Motive of Godliness. (Matt. 5:11, 
12.) 

The Sermon on the Mount is quite unlike the 



26 The: Sermon on the: Mount. 

Ten Commandments, in the sense of its principles 
being absolutely unworkable unless Jesus Christ 
can remake us. 

(i) The "Mines of God." (Luke 6:20-26.) 
I mean by "mines" an under-working charged 
With explosives. The first time you read the 
Beatitudes they appear beautiful and simple and 
unstartling, and they go unobserved into your 
subconsciousness. Then you come across some- 
thing in your practical life whereby the Holy 
Ghost brings back one of these Beatitudes, and 
you find, to your astonishment, that it is like a 
spiritual torpedo, it "rips" and "tears" and re- 
volutionizes everything you ever knew. i^he 
Beatitudes spring from the life blood of Je<nis 
Christ, that is they contain all His meaning, and 
when we read them first they seem merely mild 
and beautiful precepts for all unworldly, use- 
less people, and of very little practical use in the 
stern, workaday world in which we live. How- 
ever, we soon find that these Beatitudes contain 
the dynamite of the Holy Ghost. In Luke's ac- 
count (Luke 6: 20 :-26) the Beatitudes are par- 
alleled by the "Woes," which is an indication of 
how these principles of Jesus work. They ex- 
plode, as it were, when the circumstances of life 
require them to do so. For instance, when you 



Study Number Two. 27 

find yourself suddenly faced by circumstances 
that praise you for your spiritual possessions, 
Beatitude 3 emerges into the conscious life like 
a veritable spiritual torpedo ; or again, when your 
circumstances are finding you full of ecstacy and 
delight over spiritual service, Beatitude 4 
comes into the life with staggering amazement. 
You cannot apply them literally. You allow the 
life of God, first of all, to invade you by regener- 
ation and sanctification, and then as you have 
been soaking your mind in the teaching of Jesus, 
and it has been slipping down into the unconscious 
mind, then a set of circumstances arises where 
suddenly one of them emerges, and instantly you 
have to ask yourself, "Will I walk in the light of 
it? Will I accept the tremendous spiritual tor- 
nado which will be produced in my circumstances 
if I follow this teaching of Jesus? I have the 
power to follow it if I will!" That is the way 
the Spirit of God works. It always comes with 
astonishing discomfort to begin with, it is all out 
of proportion to our ways of looking at things, 
and we have slowly to form our walk and conver- 
sation in the line of His precepts. 

(2) The Motive of Godliness. (Matt. 5: 
11, 12.) The motive at the back of the precepts 
of the Sermon on the Mount is, first and foremost, 



28 Thk Sermon on the Mount. 

love for God. Not that the Beatitudes have no 
meaning in our relationship to men, that relation- 
ship is so obvious it scarcely needs noting, but 
the Godward aspect is not so obvious. Read the 
Beatitudes with your mind fixed on God, Put 
His name after every one of them, and you will 
realize the neglected side of the Beatitudes. 
"Blessed are the poor in spirit/' towards God. 
"Blessed are the meek/' towards God's dispensa- 
tions. "Blessed are the merciful/' to God's re- 
putation. "Blessed are the pure in heart," that 
is obviously Godward. "Blessed are the peace- 
makers" (exactly the note that was struck at the 
birth of Jesus, a peace-making relationship be- 
tween God and man) . Is it possible to carry out 
the Beatitudes ? Never ! unless God can do what 
Jesus Christ says He can, give us the Holy Spirit, 
who will remake us and put us in a new realm. 
The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of the 
life we will live when the Holy Ghost is getting 
His way with us. 

Our Lord says that His disciples are to rejoice 
on one condition, when they are reviled and per- 
secuted and slandered for His sake. That is left 
out in modern Christian teaching, we are told 
that if we suffer for "conviction's sake," for "con- 
science's sake," it is all that is necessary. Peter 



Study Number Two. 29 

says you do not do any more than other people 
if you only suffer that way. We have to suffer 
for "J esus ' sake:" that is, the whole motive un- 
derneath is to be well pleasing to God. The true 
blessedness of the saint is in determinedly making 
and keeping God first. Herein is the dispropor- 
tion of Jesus Christ's principles and moral teach- 
ing, the reason being that Christ bases everything 
on God-realization, while other teachers base 
their teaching on self-realization. Whenever 
the Holy Ghost sees a chance of glorifying Jesus, 
He will take your heart, your nerves, your whole 
personality, and simply make them blaze and glow 
with a personal, passionate devotion and love to 
the Lord Jesus Christ; not devotion to a cause, 
not a devotee to a principle, but a devoted love- 
slave of the Lord Jesus Christ. No man on earth 
has that love unless the Holy Ghost has imparted 
it. (Rom. 5 : 5.) We may admire Him and re- 
spect Him and reverence Him, but we cannot love 
Him; the only lover of the Lord Jesus Christ is 
the Holy Ghost. 

B. Divine Disadvantage. (Matt. 5: 13-16.) 

(1) Concentrated Service. (5:13.) 

(2) Conspicuous Setting. (5:14-16.) 
The disadvantage of a saint in the present 

condition of things is that he has to make the 



30 The; Sermon on the: Mount. 

centre of his life, confession of Jesus, not in secret, 
but glaringly public. The tendency to be holy 
and say nothing about it is right from every 
standpoint but from the standpoint of the Holy 
Spirit. It is doubtless much to the advantage of 
Christian men and women in this age to keep quiet 
(that is, advantage from the self-realization 
standpoint), and the tendency is growing strong- 
er, "Don't say anything about it; be a Christian, 
live a holy life, but do keep quiet." 

(i) Concentrated Service. (5:13.) "Ye 
are the salt of the earth. " Our Lord's picture of 
salt is terse and concise, for the most concentrated 
thing known to human beings is salt, it tastes like 
nothing else but salt every time and all the time. 
That is our Lord's illustration of a disciple. Salt 
preserves wholesomeness and prevents decay. 
The disciples of Jesus in the present dispensation 
preserve society from corruption. Some modern 
Christian teachers would like us to believe that 
Jesus said, "Ye are the sugar of the earth," mean- 
ing that gentleness and winsomeness without cur- 
ativeness is the idea of a Christian. How are 
we to maintain the healthy, salty tang of saintli- 
ness? By remaining rightly related to God 
through Jesus Christ. 

(2) Conspicuous Setting. (5:14-16.) The 



Study Number Two. 31 

things our Lord uses as illustrations, viz., light 
and a city set on a hill, are the most conspicuous 
things known to us, there is no possibility of mis- 
taking them. Jesus says, "Be like that, in your 
home, in your business, in your church, conspicu- 
ously a Christian for ridicule or for respect ac- 
cording to the moods of the people you are with." 
Our Lord taught His disciples, in Matthew io:t6- 
28, the need to be conspicuous proclaimers of the 
truth, and not to cover it up for fear of wolfish 
men. Our Lord will have nothing of the nature 
of a covert disciple. These three things, salt, 
light and a city set on a hill, are things among 
men that cause the most annoyance as well as 
those that attract the vilest things. Salt, to pre- 
serve from corrupion, has very often to be placed 
in the midst of it and before it can do its work it 
causes excessive irritation, which spells persecu- 
tion. Light attracts bats and hideous night- 
moths and points out the way for burglars as well 
as other people. Jesus would have us remember 
that men will certainly defraud us. A city is 
the gathering place for all the human driftwood 
that will not work for its own living, so the Chris- 
tian will have any number of parasites and un- 
grateful "hangers-on." All these considerations 
form a powerful temptation to pretend we are 



32 The Sermon on the Mount. 

not salt, to put our light under a bushel, and cover 
our city with a fog. You cannot soil light ; you 
may attempt to grasp a beam of light with the 
sootiest hand, but you leave no mark on the light. 
You can soil a moral man or an innocent man, but 
you cannot soil a man or woman who is made pure 
by the Holy Ghost and who remains there; they 
are light. A sunbeam may shine into the filth- 
iest hovel in the slums of a city, but it cannot be 
soiled. Thank God for the men and women who 
are spending their lives in the slums of the earth, 
not as moral characters to lift their brother men 
to cleaner styles, but as the light of God, pure and 
unspotted from the World, shining a way for the 
men to get back to God ! 

If we have been covering our light, uncover 
it! The light always reveals and guides and 
blazes, and men dislike it when their deeds are 
evil and prefer darkness. 

C. Divine Declaration. (Matt. 5:17-20.) 

(1) His Mission. (5:17-19.) 

(2) His Message. (5:20.) 

Here our Lord places Himself as the exict 
meaning and fulfillment of all the Old Testament 
commandments and prophecies. He says that 
His mission is to fulfill the law and the prophets, 



Study Number Two. 33 

and further that any teacher in this present era 
that breaks the former laws and teaches men to 
do so because they belong to a former dispensa- 
tion shall suffer severe impoverishment. Al! 
not ignored. There are teachers who say that 
former Old Testament laws are fulfilled in Chr'st, 
the Sermon on the Mount supersedes the Ten 
Commandments, and that because we are not un- 
der "law but under grace," it does not matter 
whether we honor our father and mother, whether 
ue covet our neighbor's possessions, etc. Be- 
ware of statements like this : "There is no need 
now-a-days to observe giving the 'tenth/ either 
of money or of time, we are under a new dispen- 
sation and it ail belongs to God." That, in pr ac- 
tical application, means sentimental "dust-throw- 
ing." The giving of the tenth is not a sign that 
it all belongs to God, but a sign that the "tenth" 
belongs to God and the rest is ours, and we are 
held responsible for what we do with it. It is 
surprising how easily we can juggle ourselves 
out of Jesus Christ's principles by one or two 
pious principles repeated often enough. The 
only safeguard is to keep personally related to 
Him. 1 John 1 : 7 is the great safeguard for all 
spiritual understanding. "Walk in the light" 
— not the light of my convictions or theories, but 



34 Thh Sermon on the Mount. 

the light God is in. Literal interpretation of the 
Sermon on the Mount is child's play; the inter- 
pretation by the Spirit of Christ is the stern work 
of a saint, and it requires all that the Lord kept 
teaching His disciples — Spiritual Concentration. 
(2) His Message. (5: 20.) 
Our Lord's message here is that the righteous- 
ness of the scribes and Pharisees was right, not 
wrong, and that His disciples were to exceed that 
righteousness. That the Pharisees did much more 
and other than righteousness is obviously clear, 
but our Lord is here talking of their righteous- 
ness. What is it that exceeds right doing if it be 
not right being ? Right being, without doing any- 
thing, is possible, but it cannot exceed the right- 
eousness of the scribes and Pharisees. The way 
I can stop right doing is by refusing to enter into 
relationship with God, both by His words and 
providences. This is an aspect of things con- 
tinually overlooked in Christian morality. The 
statement w T e so often hear, "If I were in your 
circumstances, I could be as good as you are," is 
perfectly true, but in your own circumstances you 
can do much better if the Spirit of God dwells in 
you. We are apt to think the charge is not true 
that, if they were in the circumstances we are in, 
they would be as good as we are. Of course they 



Study Number Two. 35 

would, in all probability much better, but let us 
get hold of the secret that the harder the circum- 
stances God's providence has brought around 
you, the brighter and grander does your light 
shine; the more difficult and perplexing the sur- 
roundings, the more difficult the people you have 
to deal with, the more God-glorifying is the exhi- 
bition of Christ's life in you. The monks in the 
Middle Ages refused to take the responsibilities 
of life ; all they wanted was to be and not to do. 
They could not exceed the righteousness of the 
scribes and Pharisees ; they shut themselves away 
from the world, and people to-day want to cut 
themselves off from this and that relationship. 
But Jesus Christ's message is that unless we ex- 
ceed in doing (the Pharisees were nothing in be- 
ing), we shall never enter the kingdom of God. 

Verse 16 brings out the same meaning, "When 
men see your good works, they will glorify your 
Father in Heaven." If our Lord had meant in 
being only, He would not have used the word ex- 
ceed, He would have said, "Except your right- 
eousness be otherwise than." 



Study Number Three 

MATTHEW FIVE. 



A. THE ACCOUNT WITH PURITY. 

1. Disposition and Deeds. 

Matthew 5 : 21, 22. 

2. Temper of Mind and Truth of Manner. 

Matthew 5 : 23, 26. 

3. Lnst and License. 

Matthew 5 : 27, 28. 

4. Direction of Discipline. 

Matthew 5 : 29, 30. 

B. THE ACCOUNT WITH PRACTICE. 

1. Scandal. 

Matthew 5 : 31, 32. 

2. Irreverent Reverence. 

Matthew 5:33-36. 

3. Integrity. 

Matthew 5 :37. 

C. THE ACCOUNT WITH PERSECUTION. 

1. Toward Insult. 

Matthew 5:38, 39. 

2. Towards , Extortion. 

Matthew 5:40. 

3. Towards Tyranny. 

Matthew 5:41, 42. 



STUDY NUMBER THREE. 

Matthew 5. 

Our Lord here is laying down this principle 
that, if these disciples are going to follow Him 
and obey His Spirit, they have to lay their ac- 
count with purity, with practice, and with perse- 
cution. Now purity is an intensely difficult thing 
to define. Purity is a state of heart on the inside 
which we can best define as being just like Jesus 
Christ's heart. You cannot make yourself pure 
by obeying laws. Our Lord shows how this 
heart purity works out. He takes, first of all, 
a parallel picture from the old law, and then 
shows how He interprets it from the pure-heart 
standard. It is not only a question of doing the 
things rightly, but of the doer on the inside being 
right. 

(1) Disposition and Deeds. (5:21, 22.) 
Our Lord here is alluding to something that was 
quite familiar to the disciples. It was customary 

39 



40 The Sermon on the Mount. 

for some people to totally disregard what was 
known as the common judgment, what we would 
call the ordinary law courts, and if they went too 
far they got into danger of an inner court (w r e 
have nothing quite like it in our law), and if they 
insisted on being contemptuous with that one, 
they were in danger of the final judgment, which 
meant they were flung out as wastrels and anarch- 
ists. Jesus uses that as a spiritual illustration, 
He puts it this way, that our disposition has to 
be like His, that our motive, i. e., the place we 
cannot get at ourselves, must be right. Read 
Psalm 139 with this idea in mind. The Psalm- 
ist is realizing he is much too big for himself, 
that there are things he cannot get at, but that, 
just as God can understand the big world out- 
side, He can understand the bigger world in- 
side him. To the Psalmist the world is bigger 
on the inside than on the outside, and he says, 
"Now, Lord, search me out and see if there be 
any way of grief in me," and the Hebrew words 
mean, "Trace me out; the dreams of my dreams, 
the motives of my motives, make those right." 
That is what Jesus is alluding to here, the motives 
of my motives and the springs of my dreams must 
be so right that right deeds will naturally follow. 
Other teachers tell of certain things to suppress, 



Study Number Three. 41 

certain rules and regulations to obey ; Jesus Christ 
never gives us rules and regulations. Try, for 
instance, to use the Sermon on the Mount as a 
series of rules and regulations and you find you 
cannot do it. They are truths that can only be 
interpreted by a new spirit which Jesus Christ 
puts in. Jesus teaches that He can alter our 
mainspring of action. He does not teach us to 
curb or suppress the wrong disposition, He does 
not even give us something to counteract it, He 
gives us a totally new disposition. Every now 
and again that aspect of Jesus Christ's teaching 
which is so radical is being refined away by Chris- 
tian teachers, they tell us that Jesus Christ can- 
not do what He says He can. They say, "Of 
course what the Lord meant was not what He 
said, but what I tell you," that He does not alter 
our disposition, but He puts something in us that 
counteracts the old disposition. That is a com- 
promise with something Jesus never compromised 
with. The only way in which a Christian knows 
that Jesus has given him a pure heart is by try- 
ing circumstances. This is the way it works; 
you are brought under trying circumstances, peo- 
ple imply wrong motives to you, and if the Lord 
has made your heart pure, you are the most 
astonished person in the world, because, instead 



42 The Sermon on the Mount. 

of feeling resentment, you feel exactly the op- 
posite, you feel a most amazing difference inside. 
That is the only proof we have according to the 
Sermon on the Mount that God has altered the. 
heart, not that we persuade ourselves He has 
done it, but that we prove it. When circum- 
stances put us to the test, we say, "Why, bless 
God! this is a marvelous alteration, I know now 
He has altered me because before I would have 
got sour and irritable and sarcastic and spiteful." 
Our Lord goes behind the old law to the disposi- 
tion. 

(2) Temper of Mind and Truth of Manner. 
(5:23-26.) The spiritual lesson there is the 
difference between reality and sincerity. The 
thing that Jesus alters is the temper of our minds, 
so that we are no longer in bondage to rules and 
regulations, but find when the difficulties come 
that we obey our Lord's rules easily. (See Matt. 
11 : 28-30.) 

The illustration is of a man in the old Jewish 
order going to take a paschal lamb to the priest to 
be slain, and, remembering he had leaven in his 
house, he had to go back and take the leaven out 
before he took his offering. Jesus applies it 
spiritually. If you are going to the altar and 
you remember someone has something against 



Study Number Three. 43 

you, first go and put that right, and if you are a 
saint, you will find you have the power to do it. 
A disciple of Jesus has no difficulty in doing what, 
to worldly people, would be an impossible hu- 
miliation. Many of us have sincere manners to- 
ward one another, but the test Jesus gives is not 
the truth of your manner, but the temper of your 
mind. When you come to the altar, you have 
something brought to your memory — Jesus does 
not say when you "rake up something/' that is 
where Satan gets hold of embryo Christians and 
makes them hyper-conscientious. Jesus says if 
at the altar there you remember, the inference is 
that the Spirit of God brings it to your memory, 
and when He does, never check it. Say, "Yes, 
Lord, I recognize it," and obey Him at once, no 
matter what the humiliation is. That is impos- 
sible in a worldly person and impossible in you 
and me till God has altered us. Suppose I do 
remember something at the altar, and I was in 
the right and they were in the wrong, and the 
Spirit of God says to me, "You go and obey;" if 
I have not had the temper of my mind altered by 
Jesus, I will say instantly, "No, indeed, do you 
think I am going to tell them, when I was in the 
right, that I have to make it up? Immediately 
they will say, 'I knew I would make you say you 



44 The Sermon on the Mount. 

were sorry V ' That is the temper of mind in all 
of us till we have been altered. Immediately we 
are altered the other temper of mind is there and, 
to our astonishment, we find we do things we 
never could do before. Jesus Christ brings men 
to the practical test, it is not that I say I am pure 
in heart, it is that I prove I am in my deeds, that 
the attitude is right, that I am not only sincere in 
my manner and talk, but I am sincere in the at- 
titude of my mind. 

One of the points we do not realize sufficiently 
is the influence of what we think over what we 
say. We may say wonderfully truthful things, 
but what we think is the thing that tells. It is 
quite possible to say truthful things in a truthful 
manner, and tell a lie all the time by thinking. I 
can repeat exactly what I heard you say to Mr. 
Somebody-else, word for word, every detail 
scientifically truthful, and yet I can convey a lie 
by it because the temper of my mind has been a 
different one to yours when you said the things. 

Jesus says be truthful in manner, and the one 
thing He is "going for" here is to prove that the 
disposition must be altered. All through the 
Sermon on the Mount the same thing comes out. 
Jesus is dealing on the inside, the old law dealt 
with the outside. Jesus said you have to exceed 



Study Number Three. 45 

that, do all the old law, but do much more, and 
"the only way you can do the much more is by 
letting me have my way with you, letting me give 
you my Spirit, by letting me alter you from the 
inside, and when you come into the different cir- 
cumstances and I say to you, 'Do this/ don't re- 
member what you were before I altered you, but 
remember that everything I tell you to do you 
can do, and the only knowledge you have that 
you can do it is that you discover you can, immed- 
iately you try. Don't say, 'I cannot do that, 
I tried it before and could not/ " The whole 
point of our Lord is, "Obey me, and you will find 
you have a wealth of power inside/' 

Instantly you obey, you find the temper of your 
mind is real. The great thing about Jesus is 
that He makes us real, not only sincere. Re- 
member, the people who are sincere without being 
real are not hypocrites nor shams, they are per- 
fectly earnest and honest and desirous of fulfill- 
ing all that Jesus wants, but they really cannot 
do it, the reason being they have not received the 
Person who makes them real, viz., the Holy Spirit. 

(3) Lust and License. (5:27,28.) Our 
Lord teaches here what the apostle Paul re- 
emphasizes in Romans 6: 12, viz., that sin is not 
in the mortal flesh, but in the principle that rules 



46 The: Sermon on the: Mount. 

the mortal flesh : "Let not sin therefore reign 
in your mortal body that ye should obey it in the 
lusts thereof/' The "it" he is referring to is 
the sin that dwells in your mortal body. Our 
Lord says by implication that what He alters is 
the principle of desire in our mortal bodies. 
"Lust," which means "I must have it at once," 
is the very nature of sin. Jesus alters that and 
puts love in its place, which is the opposite of lust. 
Esau and his mess of pottage are a picture of 
lust ; Jacob serving for Rachel is a picture of love. 
Our Lord in this illustration puts lust and license 
on the grossest, vilest ground, but remember, 
it applies all through, from the very lowest basis 
of immorality. Our Lord puts it on here right 
up to the very height of spiritual life. Our Lord 
says that He alters the mainspring of "I must 
have it at once," the impatience of desire. Never 
confine lust to the vile, gross elements only, it 
goes right through. It is that principle Jesus 
alters. He does not alter our human nature, 
that does not need altering; He alters the main- 
spring, and the great marvel of the salvation of 
Jesus is that He alters heredity. License means, 
"I will do what I like and care for nobody." 
Liberty means, "I have the power to do what is 
right." 



Study Number Three. 47 

Do you see how we are growing? The dis- 
ciples were taught to lay their account with 
purity, purity is too deep down for us to go to, 
our only exhibition of purity is the purity that 
was in the heart of our Lord, and that is the pur- 
ity He implants in us. Now He says that is 
deeper down than you can go, but you will know 
whether it is there by the disposition that works 
in circumstances. You will know whether it is 
there by the temper of mind you exhibit in trying 
circumstances, and you will know it is there when 
you come up against circumstances that would 
have awakened in you in the previous time lust 
and self-desire, but now they awaken the oppo- 
site. It is not a question of a possibility on the 
inside, but of a possibility that shows itself in per- 
formance. That is the only test there is. "He 
that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he 
is righteous/' (1 John 3:7.) 

(4) Direction of Discipline. (5:29, 30.) 
If Jesus can alter our disposition, what is the need 
of discipline ? Yet in these verses our Lord puts 
very stern discipline, to the parting with the right 
arm and the eye. The reason is this, that our 
physical cases, i. e., mortal bodies, have been used 
by the wrong disposition, and when the new dis- 
position is put in, the old physical case is not 



48 The Sermon on the Mount. 

taken away, it is left there for us to discipline and 
make it an obedient servant to the new disposition. 
When God alters a person by regeneration or 
sanctification, you will always notice the charac- 
teristic is a maimed life to begin with, as Jesus 
describes here. In 5:48, Jesus describes an 
absolutely different life, not a maimed life, but a 
perfect life, but in the beginning it is maimed, 
meaning by that there are a hundred and one 
things you dare not do and you do not want to 
do when you are introduced to the new disposi- 
tion, things that are to you and also in the eyes 
of the world that knew you, as your right arm 
and your eye, and the worldly person comes to 
you and says, "What an absurd idea ! Whatever 
is there wrong in that? What can be wrong in 
a 'right arm' ? It is the best thing you have ; how 
absurd you are, why do you want to go to the ex- 
treme swing of the pendulum ?" God will make 
you go to the extreme swing of the pendulum at 
the beginning. There never was a saint yet who 
did not have to start with Jesus a maimed life. 
Jesus says it is better that you should enter into 
this life, this Christian life, maimed, lovely in 
God's sight and lame in man's, than that you 
should be lovely in man's sight and lame in God's. 
You will find that principle runs all through, and 



Study Number Three. 49 

at the beginning Jesus Christ, by His Spirit in 
you, has to check your doing a great many things 
that are perfectly right for everybody else but 
you. Paul mentions the same thing when he 
says, "Now do not use your limitations to criti- 
cize someone else." The world calls you a fa- 
natic and a crank, personally I have no respect 
for a person who has not been a crank or a fa- 
natic, because it is a sure sign that he has never 
begun to seriously consider life. 

Jesus, when He alters our disposition, takes 
us back to the first beginning of our physical life, 
and He teaches us to take our body and put it in 
harmony with the new disposition, and we have 
to do it in stern discipline and get the body to 
express the new disposition, and it can only be 
done as we obey. The idea Jesus conveys here 
is that the discipline is to cut off a great many 
things for your own spiritual life's sake. People 
say, "Well, I don't see any harm in that, why 
should I not do it?" Immediately a person 
argues like that, the proof is as strong as it can 
be that Jesus Christ is not first. If I am only 
willing to give up wrong things for Jesus Christ, 
never let me talk about being in love with Him. 
Anybody will give up wrong things if he knows 
how to, but will I give up right things for Him? 



50 The Sermon on the Mount. 

A Christian is the only person who has the right 
to give up his rights. You will notice the big 
difference there is between everyone else's idea 
of purity and the Lord Jesus Christ's. Our idea 
of purity, where it does not come from Jesus 
Christ, is that of according obedience to certain 
laws and orders ; that is not purity, that is apt to 
be prudery. Read the bald, shocking statements 
of the Bible, there is nothing prudish about the 
Bible. The Bible insists on purity, not prudery; 
that is, you are capable of facing the vilest scenes 
in life, unspotted. That is what Jesus Christ 
wants. If He can only make us prudish, why, 
we would be horrified if we had to go and work 
for Him in the slums and in the moral abomina- 
tions in heathendom, we would be shocked all to 
pieces ; but with Jesus Christ's purity, He can take 
us where He went Himself — in the face of the 
vilest moral corruptions, the most hideous dis- 
eases — and keep us as pure as He kept Himself. 
The purity Jesus Christ teaches is the purity of 
His own heart which He puts into you and me. 
It is always a bad sign when a skeptic says, 
"There are things in the Bible I would not allow 
my daughter to read." What is that the evi- 
dence of? A vilely impure heart, that is all. 
The Bible, from cover to cover, will do nothing 



Study Number Three. 51 

in the shape of harm, but only good. It is to the 
impure in heart that these things are corrupting. 

B. The Account with Practice. (Matt. 
5-' 31-37- ) 

Practice means what I am continually doing 
that no one sees or knows but myself. 

(1) Scandal. (5:31, 32.) Our Lord 
taught, by example and precept, that no man 
should stand up for his own honor, but only for 
the honor of another. You can easily see in a 
hundred ways how it worked in the life of our 
Lord. They called Him a glutton, a winebibber, 
devil-possessed, a sinner, a madman, and He 
never opened His mouth; but immediately they 
said a word against His Father, He not only 
opened His mouth, but He said some of the most 
terrible things the world ever heard. Jesus 
teaches us that by His Spirit He alters the stand- 
ard of honor in the disciples. Jesus made Him- 
self of no reputation, and the disciples don't 
bother their heads about what people say about 
them, but they do bother themselves tremendously 
about what people think of Jesus Christ. The 
disciple realizes that his Lord's honor is at stake 
in his life, not his own honor. The more you 
meditate on that principle, the more opposed you 



52 The Sermon on the Mount. 

find it is to the principle of the world, even the 
Christian world. The best illustration for scan- 
dal is that of mud on your clothes. If you try 
and touch it while it is wet, you will rub it into 
the texture, but if you leave it till it is dry, you 
can flick it and it is gone without a trace. Leave 
scandal alone, never touch it. 

(2) Irreverent Reverence. (5:33-36.) In 
our Lord's day the habit of backing up ordinary 
assertions with an appeal to the name of God was 
as bad, if not worse, than in our own day. It is 
not the question of an oath in a law court, Paul 
took the oath, our Lord said something very like 
it before Caiaphas. Nowadays we talk most 
irreverently about the most reverent things. Many 
of us speak glibly and familiarly about the Holy 
Ghost, about Jesus and about God. Irreverent 
reverence, that is what our Lord checks. Do not 
flippantly talk about those things and those terms 
which ought to be mentioned with the greatest 
reverence. I remember an Indian zenana woman 
who got saved, she could not say many words of 
English, but I will never forget the way she said 
the words "J esus Christ" ! She was a very ugly 
woman, but at the pronouncement of those words 
her face became transfigured ; the whole soul of 
the woman was in reverent adoration for the 



Study Number Three. 53 

Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus here checks us and 
says, "Never you call anything in the nature of 
God or the Holy Ghost to attest what you are 
saying, speak simply and humbly, realizing that 
truth in a man is the same as truth in God/' and 
to call in God as a witness to back up what I say 
is nearly always a sign that what I am saying 
is not true. If you submit children for a long 
while to a skeptical atmosphere and call in ques- 
tion all they say, it is that, that first of all instils 
the habit of swearing. I do not mean using pro- 
fane language, but it makes children say, "Well, 
ask him." Such a thought never occurs to a 
child naturally, it only occurs when the child has 
to talk to suspicious people, who are continually 
saying, "Now I do not know whether that is 
true," and the child gets the idea that it cannot 
speak the truth unless some one else backs it up. 
Many of us are responsible for making people call 
in another witness which they have no right to 
do. 

(3) Integrity. (5:37.) Integrity means 
the unimpaired state of a thing. Suspicion is of 
the devil, and is the greatest cause for making 
people say more than they need to. In that aspect 
it "cometh of evil." In the other aspect when 
I know of eight or ten reasons for the truth of 



54 The Sermon on the Mount, 

what I am saying, it is a proof that what I am 
saying is not strictly true. If it were, we would 
never have to think of the reasons. Our Lord 
gets us back to the one simple point, "If I have 
altered your disposition you will talk like I do; 
let people do anything they like with your truth, 
but never explain it." There is a great differ- 
ence between Jesus Christ and those of us who 
are His modern followers. Jesus never explained 
anything, we are always explaining, we are al- 
ways saying, "Well, I do not mean that, I mean 
something else." We get into tangles by not 
leaving the thing alone. If people have made 
mistakes, leave them alone, let mistakes correct 
themselves. Our Lord never told His disciples 
when they made mistakes. They made any num- 
ber of blunders about Him, but He went quietly 
on planting the truth. It comes out also with 
regard to the question of praise. I always like 
to find out what people think of what I have done 
when I am not sure of having done well, but 
when I am certain I have done well, I don't care 
an atom whether folks praise or not. We have 
to live on the line of integrity. We find the same 
thing with regard to fear and courage. We all 
know the kind of men who say they are not afraid, 
but the very fact that they say it proves they are. 



Study Number Three. 55 

Jesus Christ puts in a truthfulness that never 
takes knowledge of itself. It never occurs to a 
pure, honest heart to back up what it says. It 
is a wounding insult to be met by suspicion ; that 
is why from the very first we ought never to sub- 
mit children to suspicion; if we do, we find what 
Jesus said, that what is more than simple, direct 
talk comes from the evil one, either in you or in 
any other person, is true. 

C. Account with Persecution. (Matt. 
5^38-42.) 

(1) Insult. (5: 38, 39.) The picture giv- 
en in 5 : 38, 39 is not very familiar to us. In the 
East a slap on the cheek is the grossest form of 
insult, its only equivalent with us is spitting in 
the face. Epictetus, a Roman slave, said a slave 
would rather be thrashed to death than flicked 
on the cheek. Jesus says, "Now if you are flicked 
on the cheek as my representatives, pay no at- 
tention,'' that is, show a disposition that is equiv- 
alent to turning the other cheek, which will par- 
alyze them with amazement. Personal insult will 
be the occasion in the saint of revealing the in- 
credible sweetness of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

(2) Extortion. (5:40.) Another picture 
that is unfamiliar to us. According to the Jew- 



56 The: Sermon on the: Mount. 

ish law, and the law of other countries in our 
Lord's day, if a man's cloak and coat were taken 
from him as the result of a lawsuit, he could get 
back the loan of his cloak to sleep in. Jesus 
taught His disciples that, "If people extort things 
from you when you are in my service, let them 
have the things, but go on with your work.'' 

(3) Tyranny. (5:41, 42.) Under the 
Roman dominance, the Roman soldiers could com- 
pel anyone to be a baggage carrier for a mile. 
(Simon, the Cyrenian, is a case in point; the 
Roman soldiers compelled him to be baggage car- 
rier for Jesus.) Jesus says, "If you are my dis- 
ciple, you will always do more than your duty, 
you will go the second mile." There will be 
none of the spirit of, "Oh, well, I cannot do any 
more, they have always misrepresented and mis- 
understood me." Jesus says if you are His dis- 
ciple, you will always do more than your duty. 
It would have been a sad outlook for us if He 
had not gone the second mile. 

Verse 42 is the most radical of all. The fact 
that modern Christians wiggle, twist, compro- 
mise about this verse springs from infidelity in 
the ruling providence of our Heavenly Father. 
Modern people say, "It is absurd. Do you mean 
to tell me I have to give to everyone that asks? 



Study Number Three). 57 

if I do, every beggar in the place will be at my 
door." Will they? Try it. I have yet to 
find a person who has fulfilled Jesus Christ's com- 
mand who did not find that God restrained the 
people who beg. You will find at the very heart 
of that modern wiggle is infidelity — "I do not be- 
lieve God can control the beggars; if once I am 
known to give to everybody that asks, then they 
will come." Try it. I tell you they will not. 
If ever God's ruling is seen, it is seen when once 
a disciple obeys what Jesus Christ says. 

Another thing, Jesus Christ never taught this : 
give because they deserve it; He says, "Give be- 
cause I tell you." You can always find a hundred 
and one reasons why you should not obey our 
Lord's statements, the reason being that we are 
always more apt to trust reasonings than reason, 
and reasonings always mean we do not take God 
into calculation at all. "Does this man deserve 
what I am giving him ?" Why, immediately you 
say that before Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God 
says to you, "Who are you? Do you deserve 
all you have ? Do you deserve the salvation you 
have? Do you deserve all the blessings I have 
given you more than the other man?" The great 
motive of all giving is Jesus Christ's command. 
Tolstoi applied the principles of Jesus without the 



58 The: Sermon on the; Mount, 

Spirit of Jesus ; he. applied the statements of Jesus 
literally, but he absolutely disbelieved in being 
born again, consequently there was no restraining 
hand of God, no proof that God was with him or 
in him in those particulars. But once let a dis- 
ciple get rightly related to Jesus Christ, and let 
the Spirit of God alter the disposition, then as 
circumstances arise obey His principles, and you 
will find exactly what Jesus teaches: "God is 
your Father, He loves you, you will never think 
of anything He will forget, therefore you have 
no business to worry." 



Study Number Four 

A. DIVINE RULE OF LIFE. 

1. Exhortation. 

Matthew 5:45-47. 

2. Example. 

Matthew 5 : 46. 

3. Expression. 

Matthew 5 : 48. 

B. DIVINE REGION OF RELIGION. 

1. Philanthropy. 

Matthew 6 : 1-4. 

2. Prayer. 

Matthew 6:5-14. 

3. Penance. 

Matthew 5 :16-18. 

C. DIVINE REASONINGS OF MIND. 

1. Doctrine of Deposit. 

Matthew 6 : 19-21. 

2. Doctrine of Division. 

Matthew 6 : 22, 23. 

3. Doctrine of Detachment. 

Matthew 6 : 24. 

D. DIVINE REASONINGS OF FAITH. 

1. Careful Carelessness. 

Matthew 6 : 25. 

2. Careless Unreasonableness. 

Matthew 6 : 26. 

3. Careful Uselessness. 

Matthew 6:27-29. 

4. Careful Infidelity. 

Matthew 6:30-32. 

5. Concentrated Consecration. 

Matthew 6 : 33, 34. 



STUDY NUMBER FOUR 
Matthew 5 and 6 

A. Divine Rule of Life. (Matt. 5 : 45-47.) 

Our Lord concludes by a divine rule which 
we by His Spirit ought to apply to every cir- 
cumstance and condition of our lives. Our Lord 
does not make statements which we have to fol- 
low literally; if He did, we would not grow in 
grace. He gives us a principle and a rule of 
conduct, and we have to rely upon His Spirit to 
teach us to apply them to the various circum- 
stances in which we find ourselves. 

(1) Exhortation. (5:45-47.) Our Lord's 
exhortation here is to be generous in our behavior 
to all men, whether they be good or bad. The 
marvel of the divine love is that God exhibits His 
love to bad people whom we desert. For in- 
stance, in Luke 15, we can understand after a bit 
how God is represented as the Father loving the 
prodigal son, but He also exhibits His love to 

61 



62 The Sermon on the Mount. 

the elder brother, to whom we feel a strong an- 
tipathy. Beware of walking in the spiritual life 
according to our natural affinities. We all have 
natural affinities which we bring with us to the 
world, that is, people we like and others we do 
not like, some people we get on well with and 
others we do not. Never let those likes and dis- 
likes be the rule of your Christian life. God says 
through John, "Walk in the light as He is in the 
light," and God gives you communion with peo- 
ple you have no natural affinities for. 

(2) Example. (5:46.) Woven into the 
words of our Lord's exhortation is His reference 
to our Example, and our Example is not a good 
man, or even a good Christian, but God Himself. 
(See 5 : 45 and 48.) I do not think we allow the 
big surprise of that to lay hold of us. Jesus 
never says anywhere, "Follow the best example 
you know, follow good Christians you know, 
watch the people who love me and follow them." 
He says, "Follow your Father which is in 
Heaven." 

(3.) Expression. (5:48.) The expression 
of Christian character is not good doing, but God- 
likeness. In verse 48 there is a re-emphasis of 
verse 20. The perfection of verse 48 refers to 
the disposition and temper of God in us. The 



Study Number Four. 63 

Revised Version reads, "Ye shall be perfect/' but 
that does not mean in a future state, it means, 
"You shall be perfect if you let me work in you 
what I have been describing." The whole point 
is, if the Spirit of God has transformed you on 
the inside, you will exhibit not good human char- 
acteristics, but good divine characteristics in a 
human heing. In verse 48 our Lord com- 
pletes the picture He began to give in verses 
29, 30. In the former He pictures a maimed 
life; here He pictures a well-balanced life, for 
holiness means a perfect balance between my 
disposition and the laws of God. In verses 29, 
30 our Lord pictures the maimed life, which is 
the characteristic of everyone of us at the begin- 
ning, and if we have never had that characteristic, 
the question is very open whether we have received 
the Spirit of God, because if the Spirit of God has 
regenerated us He makes us take the opposite ex- 
treme to everything we have been doing. He 
makes us what people call "fanatics." So you 
very often find in our own case and in others that, 
if we are to obey the Spirit of God, we have to 
live a limited and maimed life. But in verse 48 
Jesus gives the picture of a perfectly full-orbed 
life, not hereafter, but here. It is only as we 
walk in the light as He is in the light, that we 



6j\ The Sermon ox the Mount. 

begin to understand the example Jesus gives us — 
God, not men. It is not sufficient to be good, to 
do the right thing; you must have your goodness 
stamped by the image and superscription of Jesus. 
It is supernatural all through. The whole secret 
of a Christian, according to Jesus, is the super- 
natural made natural in us by the grace of God. 
The way it works out is not in having times of 
communion with God, but the expression of it 
works out in the practical details of our life. If 
we have been regenerated, the proof of it is when 
we come in contact with the things that create a 
"buzz." We find, to our great astonishment, we 
have a power we never had before, a power to 
keep wonderfully poised in the center of it all, a 
power that God explains only by the cross of 
Jesus Christ. It is not a question of putting 
statements of our Lord's in front of us and try- 
ing to live up to them, it is receiving His Spirit 
and finding we can live up to them with little, 
effort. 

B. Divine Region of Religion. (Matt. 
6: 1-18.) 

The region of religion means the domain of 
my life lifted to God before men ; the other region 
of our natural life lived to men before God. In 



Study Number Four. 65 

Matthew 5 our Lord demands that our disposi- 
tions be all right in our ordinary calling before 
Him. Now He says you have to live to me before 
men. The main idea in the region of religion is, 
"Your eye on Me, not on men/' 

(1) Philanthropy. (6: 1-4.) This corre- 
sponds to verse 42 of chapter 5, with this differ- 
ence, that Matthew 5 : 42 refers to the life lived 
with the eye on God. Briefly summed up, it means 
this: "Have no other motive in giving than to 
please God." Our Lord allows of no other mo- 
tive, but you find when you look at modern phil- 
anthropy it has every other motive but that. The 
motive we are continually being egged on with, 
is, "It will do them good, they need the help, they 
deserve it." Jesus never brings that aspect out 
in the whole of His Sermon. In chapter 5 it is, 
"Give because I tell you," and here it is, "Don't 
have mixed motives." Our Lord is picturing in 
chapter 6 something the Jews were familiar with. 
The Jews used to put their money in the boxes in 
the woman's court of the Temple, and the Phari- 
sees put their money in with a great clang which 
sounded like a trumpet. Jesus was standing in 
the Temple and heard the clanging sound of the 
gifts of the Pharisees, and He said, "Now don't 
do that sort of thing, their motive is to be known 



66 The Sermon on the Mount. 

as generous givers ; if you are my disciples, never 
give with any other motive than that you are 
pleasing God." It is a very penetrating thing 
to ask yourself this question before God, What 
was my motive in doing that kind act? You will 
be astounded how rarely the Spirit of .God gets a 
chance to fit our motives on to be right with God, 
we mix them with a thousand and one other mo- 
tives, which Jesus steadily makes simple, one 
motive only, "your eye on me." That is the way 
we become children of God. 

(2) Prayer. (6: 5-14.) Prayer here is 
looked at in the same way as philanthropy, with 
the one motive, viz., to please God. "Your Fath- 
er knoweth what things ye have need of before 
ye ask Him." (Verse 8.) Then common sense 
says, "Why ask Him?" Because the whole idea 
of prayer in this chapter is that Jesus is saying, 
"Watch your motive before God, have no other 
motive as Christians than to know your Heavenly 
Father." Notice all through this chapter the 
essential simplicity of our Lord's main principle — 
right towards God, right towards God, no mat- 
ter what people think. 

(3) Penance. (6:16-18.) Penance is put- 
ting myself into a physical strait-jacket for the 
sake of disciplining my spiritual character. Pen- 



Study Number Four. 67 

ance is the great note in the Roman Catholic re- 
ligion, and it is altogether omitted in Protestant- 
ism, and we have been the losers in the conse- 
quence. We have been so full of antipathy to 
Roman Catholic doctrines that we have missed 
altogether what our Lord and also St. Paul said 
about the need to have penance. You will find 
that physical sloth will upset spiritual devotion 
quicker than anything. If the devil can't get 
at us by enticing to sin, he gets in by "sleeping- 
sickness," spiritually. "Now you can't possibly 
get up in the morning to pray, you are working 
hard all day, and you can't give that time to 
prayer, you must not do this and that, God doesn't 
expect it." Jesus says, "God does expect it." 

In verse 16 our Lord says when you do fast 
don't make cheap martyrs of yourself, pretend by 
a joyful face that you are not putting yourself 
through the stern discipline that God knows you 
are. The pictures were familiar to Jews, they 
were commanded to pray several times a day, and 
the Pharisees took care that they happened to be 
in the midst of a city when the hour for prayer 
came, and they would jump down, and in an osten- 
tatious manner give themselves to prayer in public. 
Jesus says, "Don't be like that. That is their 
motive, they want to be known as praying people 



68 The Sermon on the Mount. 

and verily they have their reward." And the 
same with their times of fasting, they looked so 
sad and miserable that everyone knew they were 
fasting. Jesus says when you have to go through 
a period of discipline before God, pretend you 
are not going through it. (Verse 17.) If ever 
I can tell to others the discipline I put myself 
through in order to further my life with God, the 
discipline from that momjent ^becomes useless. 
Our Lord repeats over and over again, You have 
to have a relationship between you and God which 
nobody knows and nobody dare know ; you must 
have something between you and God that the 
dearest friend on earth never guesses; if you have 
a life of discipline with God, don't say a word 
about it, appear not unto men to fast. The Spirit 
of God will apply it to each of us, and we will see 
there are lines of discipline, lines of limitation, 
physical and mental, which the Spirit of God says, 
"Now you must not allow yourself." When you 
fast, fast to your Father in secret, not before men. 
The ostensible fasts on the outside are of no use ; 
it is the fasts on the inside that God knows. 

C. Divine Reasonings of Mind. Matt. 

6: 19-24.) 
We mean by divine reasonings, the way a 



Study Number Four. 69 

Christian thinks about everything. Until this is 
learned by our obedience to God, the majority of 
us drift in Christian experience without any 
thinking. One of the most fruitful things is to 
find out what the New Testament says about the 
mind. The Spirit of God comes through Paul 
and Peter and John with the one steady appeal to 
stir up our minds. The only way Satan can get 
in as an angel of light is to those Christians whose 
hearts are right, but whose minds are not stirred 
up. Our Lord here deals with the question of 
the mind, how I am to think and reason about 
things. 

(1) Doctrine of Deposit. (6: 19-21.) In 
thinking as a Christian, every effort to persuade 
myself that the real treasure of my heart and 
mind is with God is a sure sign that it is not. 
If I have to reason with myself, and say I am per- 
fectly certain that my treasure is in Heaven, and 
my motives are right with God, then you may be 
sure it is not so. The first thing Jesus says is, 
"Lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven/' 
Spiritual experience means that the Spirit of God 
in our hearts teaches us to fasten our eyes and 
our thinking on God, and when in practical life 
we come to deal with money matters and matters 
of earth, the Spirit of God reminds us, to our 



yo The Sermon on the Mount. 

great peace and delight, that our treasures are 
in Heaven, and we find we begin to do the right 
thing with our property and money and every- 
thing that has to do with this earth in a way that 
astonishes us. The ideal is not to make out that 
my motive is right, but that the motive has been 
put right, and therefore it begins to put my 
thinking right. All the confusion and conflict 
arises when people try to be Christians without 
the Spirit of God ; they try to reason it out. The 
first thing we have to do is to be born again of 
the Spirit of God, and obey Him as He begins to 
explain to our mind that the real motive at the 
heart of it is all right. 

(2) Doctrine of Division. (6:22, 23.) 
We have to learn from this that the correct un- 
derstanding of all physical and mental things is 
by a single eye. That is the symbol for the con- 
science of a man being put right with God by the 
Holy Spirit. One idea runs all through our 
Lord's teaching: "Right with God, right with 
God!" First, second and third! The proof 
that we are right with God is that we never try 
to be right, because the Spirit of God has put us 
in the right relationship. That is a roundabout 
way of saying that if I have been born again of 
the Holy Ghost, I am right with God, then if 



Study Number Four. 71 

I keep in the light as He is in the light, that keeps 
my eye single, and slowly and surely all my bod- 
ily actions begin to be put into the right relation- 
ship, and everything becomes full of harmony and 
simplicity and peace. To rightly divide material 
matters and interests, a man must be born from 
above. 

(3) Doctrine of Detachment. (6:24.) 
This is a fundamental and favorite theme of our 
Lord's: you cannot be good and bad at one and 
the same time, and you cannot serve God with 
an eye on successful service; and you can never 
make "honesty the best policy," a motive. These 
thoughts run all through Jesus Christ's teach- 
ing. If I am to be holy, there is one considera- 
tion, I have to stand right with God, and see that 
that relationship is the one thing that is never 
dimmed in my practical life, and all other things 
will right themselves. Jesus says you cannot 
serve God and mammon. What we mean by a 
worldly Christian is one who frankly disbelieves 
that statement of our Lord's, and says, "Oh, yes, 
with a little more skill and subtlety and wisdom 
(we call it diplomacy), a little more compromise, 
we can serve both." The devil's temptation to 
our Lord to compromise is repeated over and over 
again. The doctrine of detachment means that 



72 The Sermon on the Mount. 

I must realize that a division is made between the 
Christian and the world, as high as Heaven and 
as deep as Hell. That is the reason Jesus says, 
as He did in chapter 5 (also in 1 Peter 4:4), 
that when you get right with God you become 
what the world calls "a fanatic." When you 
get right with God you become something that 
is contemptible in the eyes of the world. Try 
to put into practice any of the principles of the 
Sermon on the Mount and you will be treated, 
not with indignation, but with amusement, and 
if you persist in it you will find the world gets 
annoyed and detests you. In the beginning of 
the Christian life always make allowance for the 
swing of the pendulum. It is not an accident, 
it is the set purpose of God that we go to the ex- 
treme reaction from what we were before. He 
sees that we do the exact opposite of all we did 
before, God does not gradually overcome it, He 
violently breaks us from it, and only brings us 
back into the domain of men when we are per- 
fectly right with Him, so when we get back into 
the domain of men we are among them, yet not 
of them. (John 17.) When we are matured in 
godliness and have proved to Jesus that we do not 
compromise between mammon and godliness, 
then He trusts us and trusts His own honor in 



Study Number Four. 73 

placing us where the world, the flesh and the 
devil may try us, knowing that "He that is in us 
is greater than he that is in the world." 

D. Divine Reasonings of Faith. (Matt. 

6:25-34.) 
The reasonings of faith mean the practical 
working out in my life of my implicit, determined 
confidence in God. 

(1) Careful Carelessness. (6:25.) Jesus 
does not say that a man who doesn't think about 
anything is blessed; that man is a fool. Jesus 
says you must be carefully careless about every- 
thing but one thing: "Your right relationship 
to me." Our Lord teaches here the complete re- 
versal of the reasonings of a practical, sensible 
person who has no faith in God whatever. Our 
Lord tells the disciples that they have to be studi- 
ously careful that they are careless about how 
they stand to self-interest, to food, to drink and 
to personal property, because they are set on 
minding the right relationship to God. I have 
to be carefully careless for one reason. Ever 
so many people are careless over what they eat 
and drink, and they suffer for it ; they are careless 
about what they put on, and they look as they 
have no business to look ; thev are careless about 



74 The Sermon on the Mount. 

m^w , 

property, and God will hold them responsible for 
it. What Jesus is saying is that the great care 
of the life is to make the relationship to God the 
one care, and everything else secondary. Im- 
mediately you look at that you find it is the most 
revolutionary statement human ears ever listened 
to. You will find our arguing is exactly the 
opposite, even the most spiritual of us. We say, 
"I must live, I must make so much money, I must 
be clothed, I must be fed," that is how it begins ; 
that is, the great concern of the life is not God; 
the great concern of the life is how I am going to 
fit myself to live. Jesus says, "Reverse the order, 
get rightly related to Me first, see that you main- 
tain that as the greatest care of your life, never 
put the concentration of your care on the other 
things." You will find, if you read the Old and 
New Testaments, the reason God allows "dry 
rot," bankruptcy, disease and upset, is that His 
children will not obey Jesus Christ on that line. 
It is one of the severest disciplines, to allow the 
Spirit of God to bring us into harmony with Je- 
sus on these concluding verses of Matthew 6. 

(2) Careful Unreasonableness. (6: 26.) 
To be careful of all that the natural man says we 
must be careful over, Jesus declares unreason- 
able, because the natural man says to think about 



Study Number Four. 75 

the means of living in order to live. Picture to 
yourself all the sparrows and blackbirds and 
thrushes sitting on hedges in the early spring, 
thinking and worrying their heads about how 
they would stick their feathers in. Jesus says 
they don't bother themselves at all. The very 
thing that makes them what they are is not their 
'thought, but the Father's which is in Heaven. 
Jesus says, "You maintain obedience to the Holy 
Spirit, who is the real principle of your life, and 
He will supply the feathers for you. You are 
much better than a sparrow." Our Lord uses 
that illustration more than once. He does not 
use it by accident, He uses it purposely to show 
us the utter unreasonableness, from His stand- 
point, of being so anxious about the means of liv- 
ing. 

(3) Careful Uselessness. (6:27-29.) Our 
Lord says that it is utterly useless to mistake care- 
ful consideration of circumstances for that which 
produces character. "Consider the lily/' it obeys 
the law of its life in the circumstances it is placed 
in. As Christians, consider your hidden life 
with God, i. e. } pay attention to the source, and 
God will look after the outflow. The hardest work- 
ing thing is a bird, but it does not work to stick 
feathers on itself ; it obeys the law of its life and 



76 The Sermon ox the Mount, 

becomes what it is. Jesus Christ's argument is, 
"You are the men and women who are the fittest 
to do the work of the world, the other people are 
not, because the other people have the ulterior mo- 
tive of looking after circumstances in order to 
produce a fine character. It cannot be done. 
If you will concentrate on the life I give you, 
make that your business, you are perfectly free 
for all the other things because you know your 
Father is watching the life on the inside." You 
cannot produce the life on the inside by heeding 
the outside all the time. Imagine a lily doing 
what some of us want to do spiritually. "Oh, 
I must give up this, I must go here and there" — 
quick-silver Christians. Imagine a lily hauling 
itself out of a pot and saying, "Well, I don't 
think I smell nice here, I don't think I look exactly 
right." The lily's duty is to do what it does — 
obey the law of its life where it is placed by the 
gardener. Paul says, "All these things work to- 
gether for your good." Watch your life with 
God, see that that is right and you will grow all 
right. 

(4) Careful Infidelity. (6:30-32.) Jesus 
tersely sums up common-sense carefulness, if it 
is in a person without the indwelling Spirit of 
God, as infidelity. Since you received the Spirit 



Study Number Four. 77 

of God and obeyed Him, Whenever you try to 
put other things first, you find confusion, you find 
the Spirit of God presses through and says, "No, 
this first, where do I come in this new relation- 
ship, in this mapped-out holiday, in these new 
books you are buying?" The Spirit of God al- 
ways presses that point till we learn to obey the 
first consideration ; knowing that God is my Fath- 
er, He loves me, I shall never think of anything 
He will forget; why should I worry? It is not 
only wrong to worry, it is real infidelity, because 
it means, "God cannot look after my practical 
little details" (and it is never anything else that 
worries us). Did you ever notice what Jesus 
says (in Matthew 13) will choke the life He 
puts in? The devil? No, "The cares of this 
world." It is the little foxes, the little worries, 
always, and that is how infidelity begins. The 
great cure for infidelity is obedience to the Spirit 
of God. . If once we get into our hearts and lives 
in thinking, what God has put in us spiritually, 
we would find that the men and women who are 
rightly related to God are the men and women 
who carry in them heaven on the way to Heaven, 
that is, they are free to do the work of the world 
like no one else. A business man with the Spirit 
of God in him can do the work of a business man 



78 The: Sermon on the Mount. 

ten thousand-fold better /than a man without 
the Spirit, because the responsibility of his life 
is of! him and on God. 

{5) Concentrated Consecration. (6:33,34.) 
Our L,ord teaches that the one great secret of 
Christian health and prosperity is concentration 
on God and His purposes. 



Study Number Five 

MATTHEW SEVEN. 



A. CHRISTIAN CHARACTERISTICS. 

1. The Uncritical Temper. 

Matthew 7 : 1. 

2. The Undeviating Test. 

Matthew 7 : 2. 

3. The Undesirable Truth-Teller. 

Matthew 7 : 3-5. 

B. CHRISTIAN CONSIDERATENESS. 

1. The Need to Discriminate. 

Matthew 7 : 6. 

2. The Notion of Divine Control. 

Matthew 7:10. 

3. The Necessity for Discernment. 

Matthew 7 : 11. 

C. CHRISTIAN COMPREHENSIVENESS. 

1. The Positive Margin of Righteousness. 

2. The Proverbial Maxim of Reasonableness. 

3. The Principal Meaning of Revelation. 



STUDY NUMBER FIVE 
Matthew 7. 

A. Christian Characteristics. (MatL 

7:i-5-) 

A characteristic is something which steadily 
prevails, not something that occasionally mani- 
fests itself. It is what people do steadily and 
persistently that makes their character. This 
chapter indicates the steady characteristics of a 
Christian, not what a Christian is occasionally; 
that is a spasmodic thing which God mourns over, 
"Thy goodness is as a morning cloud," He says. 

(1) The Uncritical Temper. (7: 1.) Our 
Lord says regarding Critical judgment, "Ab- 
stain!" This sounds very strange, because the 
characteristic of the Holy Spirit in a believer is 
to reveal to him the things that are wrong; but 
the strangeness is only on the surface, the dis- 
cernment of the Holy Spirit is not for purposes of 
criticism, but for purposes of conversion. The 

81 



8a Study Number Five:. 

Holy Spirit reveals to you something of the na- 
ture of unbelief and sin perhaps in other people, 
perhaps in yourself. His purpose is not to make 
you feel the smug satisfaction of a critical specta- 
tor, "Well, thank God I am not like that," but 
exactly the opposite, to make you turn clean round 
from the whole thing, or, if it is in someone else, 
to make you lay hold of God so that God enables 
him to turn away from the wrong thing. (See 
i> 0} sjqissod ;ou si uispquQ ('91 :£ uuof 1 
wholesome spiritual life, for when criticism be- 
comes a habit it destroys moral energy, kills faith, 
and paralyzes spiritual force. The critical fa- 
culty is an intellectual one, not a moral one. A 
critic must be removed from what he criticizes. 
The only person who can criticize human life is 
the Holy Ghost. No human being dare criticize 
another human being, because immediately he 
does, he puts himself in a different place altogeth- 
er to the one he criticizes. Our Lord al 1 ows no 
room for criticism; He makes any amount of 
room for discrimination. When a man criti- 
cizes a work of art or a piece of music his informa- 
tion must be complete, and he stands away from 
the thing he criticizes, and is able to criticize it 
as superior to it. Jesus says you can never take 
that attitude, and if anyone does take that spirit 



Study Number Five. 83 

of criticism he grieves the Spirit of God and in- 
stantly puts himself in the wrong position. Crit- 
icism when it decomposes becomes deadly. If 
you are criticized much, it has the effect of de- 
composing you, you become good for nothing. 
After a good dose of criticism all the gumption 
and power and spiritual life is knocked out of you 
for a time. That is never the work of the Holy 
Ghost and never the work of the saint; it is the 
work of the devil always. Whenever criticism 
is used, it is Jesus saying, "Apply that to your- 
self/' but never apply it to anyone else. Any 
point of view that makes me decompose other 
persons, makes me lynx-eyed to see where they 
are wrong, and the effect of my seeing where they 
are wrong is to paralyze them ; it does not do them 
any good, which shows that criticism never came 
from the jHoly Ghost. If I come and say, 
"Well, I love you, but I must tell you so and so/' 
I simply am an unreal fraud, I do not love you, I 
have put myself into a position far superior to 
you, I am in the position of a critic of a work of 
art; but Jesus says a disciple can never stand off 
from another life and criticize it. So He advo- 
cates here to be of an uncritical spirit. Let that 
maxim of the Lord's sink into your heart and you 
will see how it hauls you up, "Judge not;" why, 



84 The Sermon on the Mount. 

we are always at it. Any power in me that sep- 
arates the set of powers in another soul and pre- 
vents it from being one force is critical and bad. 

The effect of criticism is always to divide the 
powers of the other person. You know some 
simple, honest soul who is doing things you know 
to be wrong, now be careful, if you take the part 
of the devil and become a critic, you will divide 
the powers of that soul and prevent it being a 
force for anything. You will knock it all to 
pieces. Take Jesus Christ's way, tell Him, and 
"I will give you life for him that sins not unto 
death." You will find when the Holy Ghost dis- 
criminates, He criticizes in the true position of a 
critic, that is, He is able to show what is wrong 
without wounding and hurting ; when we criticize 
we wound in such a way that the powers never 
get back to their right purposes. Jesus says to 
be uncritical in your temper. It is not done once 
and for all, we have to be always remembering 
that that is our Lord's rule of conduct. Beware 
of anything that puts you in the superior person's 
place. 1 

(2) The Undeviating Test. (7:2.) That 
verse is not a haphazard guess, it is an eternal 
law of God. A scriptural case in point: when 
Mary of Bethany broke the alabaster box of oint- 



Study Number Five;. 85 

ment, the disciples said, "What a waste." John 
says that one disciple in particular said the words, 
viz., Judas. When Jesus referred to Judas in 
John 17, He called him a "son of waste." What- 
ever judgment I give, it is measured to me again. 
"I am perfectly certain Mrs. So-and-so has been 
criticizing me." Well, what have you been do- 
ing? You will never find it fail, and Jesus puts 
it here in connection with criticism, if you have 
been shrewd in finding out defects in others, 
remember that will be exactly the measure given 
to you, that is the way people will judge you, and 
in Psalm 18 the Psalmist says that is how God is 
to us, if we are "froward" to God, He is "fro- 
war d" to us ; if we are pure towards God, He is 
pure towards us. It works from God's throne 
right down ; life serves back in the coin you pay. 
Romans 2 : 1 applies it in a still more definite 
way, and says that the person who criticizes an- 
other is guilty of that very thing, not only in pos- 
sibility but in actuality. We do not believe the 
statements of the Bible to begin with, for in- 
stance, do we believe that statement that what I 
criticize in another I am guilty of myself? God 
does not look at the act, He looks at the possi- 
bility. The consequence is this, we can always 
tell sin in another, why? Because we are sin- 



86 The: Sermon on the Mount. 

ners and the great danger is mistaking carnal 
suspicion for the conviction of the Holy Ghost. 
The fact that I can see hypocrisy and fraud and 
unreality in other people is because they are all in 
my heart, and if I put myself in a superior posi- 
tion and tell them of it, I have put myself in the 
place of the Holy Ghost. Take that idea and 
see what Jesus says, "Out of the human heart 
proceed," and then follows the catalogue. When 
the Holy Ghost convicts He convicts for conver- 
sion, that they might turn round and be put in 
another place and have different characteristics. 
The great characteristic of a saint is humility, 
that is, feeling the full realization of, "Yes, all 
those things and all the other evils would have 
been manifested in me but for the grace of God, 
therefore I have no right to judge." Jesus says, 
"Don't," for if you do, it will be measured to 
you exactly as you have judged. Which one of 
us would dare stand before God and say, "My 
God, judge me as I have judged my f ello v/men ?" 
We have judged our fellowmen as sinners; if 
God judged us like that, we would go to Hell. 
God judges us through the marvelous atonement 
of Jesus Christ. 

(3) The Undesirable Truth-teller.. The 
kind impudence of the average truth-teller is in- 



Study Number Five;. 87 

spired of the devil when it comes to pointing out 
the defects of other people. Watch, for instance, 
the characteristics of the devil in the Bible. The 
devil is lynx-eyed for things he can criticize, and 
we have all had part and parcel with him in 
times past; we have all been shrewd. "I just 
want to tell you, my friend, you have something 
in your eye that is very objectionable, let me take 
it out and you will feel better ;" that puts me in 
a superior position to you. I am further on than 
you, a finer spiritual character. Where do you 
get that characteristic? In the Lord Jesus 
Christ? Never, He took on Himself the form 
of a servant, — "I speak the words my Father 
would have me speak." How did He do it ? By 
submitting His intellect to His Father, and when 
the Spirit of God works through His saints He 
works through them unbeknown to them; He 
works through them like light; He concentrates 
His light on them, and you know what is wrong 
with you, and if you do not understand the prin- 
ciple, you will say, "That person is always criti- 
cizing me." He is nothing of the sort; it is 
the Spirit of God through him that has dis- 
cerned in you what is wrong. But what Jesus 
is pointing out is, "Beware of taking the place 



88 Ths Sermon on th£ Mount, 

of the Holy Spirit; beware of putting yourself in 
the superior person's place." 

The last curse in a Christian's life is the other 
person who becomes a providence to you, quite 
certain you cannot do anything without him, and 
if you do not heed him it will be very bad for you 
and very risky. The position is one Jesus has 
ridiculed here with terrific power. He actually 
says in verse 5, "Thou hypocrite." The word 
hypocrite does not mean a person who is playing 
two parts consciously for his own ends ; the word 
hypocrite is literally, play-actor, one whose real- 
ity is not in keeping with sincerity. When we 
begin to find fault with other people, we are not 
hypocrites; we are perfectly sincere, and say, "All 
I desire is their good," but Jesus says in reality 
you are a fraud; you are a play-actor. "Thou 
hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine 
own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast 
out the mote out of thy brother's eye." If I have 
let God remove the beam from my own outlook on 
life by His mighty grace, I will carry with me 
the sunlight confidence and hope that God can 
easily do for my brother what He has done for 
me, because he only has a splinter; I have had a 
log of wood ! Look for a moment in your own 
heart and you find this is the confidence God's sal- 



Study Number Five. 89 

vation gives you, "I am so amazed that God has 
altered me that I can despair of nobody." When 
anyone comes across you after you have been 
marveiously saved by the grace of God, you have 
the sunshine confidence that inspires him, and 
you say, "Oh, yes, God can undertake for you; 
you are only a little bit wrong, but I was wrong 
down to the remote attitude of my mind; I was 
a mean, prejudiced, self-interested, self-seeking 
person, and God altered me, and therefore I can 
never despair of you." Beware of the uncon- 
scious twist that makes you feel like pious Chris- 
tians, who can talk well; but by laying to heart 
these sturdy rules of our Lord's, let us grow up 
into Him in all things. Reflect on the first five 
verses of this chapter, and you will see at once 
why a man like Daniel had to bow his head in 
vicarious humiliation and intercession. "I have 
sinned," he said, "with Thy people," and the call 
every now and again comes to communities and 
nations as it came to Daniel. These statements 
of Jesus save us from that fearful peril of spirit- 
ual conceit, "Thank God, I am not as other men." 

B. Christian Considerations. (7:7-11.) 

Consider how God dealt and deals with you, 
says our Lord, and then consider again that you 



90 Thk Sermon on the: Mount. 

do likewise to others. "Never believe that thing 
that ought not to be true." 

(i) The Need to Discriminate. (7:6.) 
In this verse Jesus inculcates the need to careful- 
ly examine what you present in the way of God's 
truth to other people. If you present, He says, 
the perils of God's revelation to unspiritual people, 
they will trample the pearls under foot and turn 
again and make a havoc of you. Jesus does not 
say they will turn and trample you under their 
feet; that would not matter so much, but they 
will trample the truth of God under their feet 
and rend you. The Holy Spirit alone can teach 
any one of us what that means. There are some 
truths of God that God will not make simple, and 
that is why Jesus said, "I speak in parables." 
The only thing God makes plain in the Bible is 
the way of salvation and the way of sanctification ; 
after that it depends entirely on my walking in 
the light. Over and over people "water down" the 
Word of God to suit those who are not spiritual, 
the consequence is the Word of God is trampled 
under the feet of swine, and the people of God are 
being rent in pieces. What we have to ask our- 
selves is, "What way am I flinging God's truth 
before unspiritual swine?" The words are not 



Study Number Five;. 91 

mere human words, they are the words of Jesus 
Christ. 

When Jesus talks about our confession before 
men, He never says to confess anything but Him- 
self ("He that confesseth Me before men"), and 
you will find every time you give a testimony on 
another line, what Jesus says here is true, the tes- 
timony on other lines is for saints, for those who 
understand and are spiritual; your testimony to 
the world is Jesus Christ, confess Him. "He 
saved me, He sanctified me, He puts me right 
with God/' Jesus says if you do that, "I will 
glorify you before my Father in Heaven. On 
the other hand, be careful how you give my holy 
things to dogs." Dogs are a symbol of the folks 
who live on the streets, the outside people who 
say there is nothing mysterious in the Bible, it is 
not inspired, it is simply an ordinary book; don't 
cast your holy things before them, and be careful 
that you don't give the pearl of God's truth to 
men who are swine. Paul gives illustration after 
illustration, as our Lord does, of the pearl of 
sanctification being dragged in the mire of forni- 
cation. It all comes through people not revering 
and not respecting the mighty caution of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. 



92 The Sermon on the Mount. 

(2) The Notion of Divine Control. (77-10.) 
Our Lord, by the simple argument of these verses, 
urges us to keep our minds filled with the notion 
of God's control behind everything, and that 
means that the disciple must always maintain an 
attitude of perfect trust and an eagerness to con- 
tinually ask God for things and for answers to 
questions; those things are not spontaneously 
given us by the Holy Spirit. Paul makes a big 
distinction between being possessed of the Spirit 
and forming the mind of Christ. Jesus is lay- 
ing down rules for conduct of those who have 
the Spirit. Notion your mind with the idea that 
God is there. If once all the mind is notioned 
along that line, when you are in difficulties it is 
as easy as breathing to remember, "Why, my 
Father knows all about it." It is not an effort, 
it comes naturally when perplexities are very 
pressing ; before you have gone and asked this and 
that person, now the notion is forming so power- 
fully in you that you simply go to God about it. 
You will always know whether the notion is 
working by the way you act in difficult circum- 
stances. Who is the first one you go to ? What 
is the first thing you do ? What is the first power 
you rely on? It is the rule that works on the 
principle we indicated in Matthew 6, God is my 



Study Number Five. 93 

Father, He loves me, I shall never think of any- 
thing He'll forget, why should I worry? There 
are times when God cannot lift the darkness from 
you, but trust Him ; Jesus said He will appear to 
you like an unkind friend, but He is not ; He will 
appear to you like an unnatural father, but He is 
not; He will appear to you like an unjust judge, 
but He is not. Keep that notion strong. If 
we let these searchlights go straight down to 
the root of our lives, we shall find why Jesus said, 
"Don't judge," we won't have any time to; the 
whole of our time will be taken up living in the 
life and power of God so that He can pour out 
through us rivers of living water ; some of us are 
so concerned about the outflow that it dries up. 
We continually ask, "Am I of any use?" Jesus 
tells us how we are to be of use: "If you believe 
on me, out of you will flow rivers of living water." 
Keep the notion strong and growing, of the mind 
of God behind all things. Nothing happens in 
any particular unless God's will is behind; there- 
fore I rest perfectly confident. And remember, 
prayer is not only asking, it is an attitude, an at- 
titude that produces an atmosphere in which ask- 
ing is perfectly natural. 

(3) The Necessity for Discernment. (7: 11.) 
The discernment here needed is the reasoning fa- 



94 The; Sermon on the; Mount. 

culty of the saint's mind applied to the saint's self. 
If you, an evil being, saved by grace, can have 
such wonderfully kind thoughts and do such won- 
derfully kind things, how much more will your 
Heavenly Father give good things to those who 
ask Him? Probably one of the things that 
most scares the average evangelical Christian is 
when he hears some of us saying to an ordinary 
sinner, "If you ask God for the Holy Spirit, He 
will give Him you." How shocking! Fancy 
telling a sinner to ask God to give him the Holy 
Spirit! They give the old reasoning, "But I 
thought the Bible said, if I regard iniquity in my 
heart the Lord will not hear me." Certainly He 
won't, but that is when you are a Christian; if 
you are rightly related to God and regard in- 
iquity in your heart, God won't hear your prayer ; 
but Jesus is speaking of the time before that. "If 
you, being evil." 

We put ourselves in God's place, in the place 
of the superior person; Jesus says, "Get this rea- 
soning incorporated into you. How much have 
you deserved? Nothing, everything has been 
given you by God." We find, over and over 
again, by our actions and sympathy to certain peo- 
ple, we blame God for His neglect of them, and 
God never says a word; we never say a word 



Study Number Five. 95 

against God, but by our attitude we say that we 
are filling up what God forgot to do. Jesus says. 
"Never have that notion, never allow it to come 
in." In all probability the Spirit of God will be- 
gin to show that because we have neglected what 
we ought to have done they are where they are. 

Take the great craze of what is called "So- 
cialism," which is getting into the very churches. 
The Church is saying that Jesus Christ came to 
be a social reformer. A ridiculous notion. We 
are to be social reformers, not God. God came 
to alter us, and we are trying now to shirk our 
responsibility and put it on God and say God 
does that; the thing He does is to alter our dis- 
position and put us right. These rules of Jesus 
would instantly make social reformers, it would 
begin straight away where we live. What am 
I like in my relationship to my father and mother, 
to my brothers and sisters, my friends, my em- 
ployers, my employees? Have I this habitual 
spiritual discernment of understanding that all 
the good things that have been given to me have 
been given by the sheer sovereign grace of God? 

Then God save me from the mean, accursed- 
economical notion that I must only help the people 
who deserve it ! Sometimes one can almost hear 
the Spirit of God shout in the heart, "Who are 



96 The Sermon on the Mount. 

you, that you talk like that? Did you deserve 
the salvation of God; did you deserve the sanc- 
tification that God has given you ; did you deserve 
to be filled with the Spirit?'' It is all done out 
of the sheer sovereign mercy of God. "Then 
be like your Father in Heaven," says Jesus ; "have 
a perfect disposition like His." Again Jesus 
puts it, "Love as I have loved." That is not 
done once and for all ; it is a continual, steadfast, 
growing habit of life. 

Humility and holiness always go together. 
You find, whenever the hardness and the harsh- 
ness begin to creep into personal actions toward 
one another, no matter what the preaching is like, 
the preaching may be as stern and true as God's 
Word, but if the harshness and hardness come 
into our actions, we may be certain we are swerv- 
ing from the light. Never "water down" God's 
truth, and never forget when we deal with one 
another that we are sinners saved by grace, no 
matter where we stand. If we stand in the ful- 
ness of the blessing of God, we stand there by no 
other right than the sheer sovereign grace of God. 

C. Christian Comprehensiveness. (7:12.) 

Christian grace comprehends all the man. 
(See Mark 12: 30, 31.) It is not that you will 



Study Number Five. 97 

be pure in heart only, not only that you will have 
a mind enlightened, not only a soul put right, not 
only divine strength given, but the whole lot com- 
prehended by the marvelous power and grace of 
God. That is what Jesus is referring to in verse 
12 — the whole man, body, soul and spirit being 
brought into fascinating captivity to the Lord Je- 
sus Christ. An illustration is that of the gas 
mantel; if it is not rightly adjusted, it does not 
glow rightly, only one bit glows, but get it ad- 
justed exactly, then when the light comes the 
whole thing is comprehended in one great blaze 
of light. That is what Jesus indicates here, that 
every bit of the nature (not parts of it, some of 
us have goodness in spots) has to be absolutely 
absorbing till we are one glow with the compre- 
hensive goodness of God. Paul puts it this way, 
"If ye are children of light, walk in the light, and 
ye shall have your fruit in all righteousness, in all 
goodness and in all truth." (See Eph. 5:8,9.) 
(1) The Positive Margin of Righteousness. 
The limit to the manifested grace of God in me 
is my body, and the whole of my body. Some of 
us can understand having a pure heart, having 
minds rightly adjusted to God, being in- 
dwelt by the Spirit, but what about the 
incandescent body, what about the finger tips 



98 The Sermon on the Mount. 

what about the bodily organs, what about the 
bodily relationship, what about the eyes and the 
mouth and the ears? That is the margin of 
righteousness in me. 

You will find that there is a divorce possible 
in our outlook that is not possible in Jesus Christ. 
We make a divorce between the clear intellectual 
understanding of things and the practical out- 
come. Jesus has nothing to do with it, He won't 
estimate our fine intellectual conception unless 
the practical outcome is shown in reality. There 
is no estimate ever given by our Lord of an elo- 
quent, sincere prophet or preacher. He sums such 
up in Matthew 7. They were sincere, and were 
honoring the Word, so the devils were cast out, 
but Jesus said, "Depart from me." 

We have a very great snare in our capacity 
to understand a thing clearly with our minds and 
exhaust it by stating it, and you will often find 
that overmuch earnestness blinds the life to re- 
ality. When once you begin to get in earnest, 
you will find that becomes your god, it is the ear- 
nestness and zeal with which things are said and 
done, and you find after awhile the reality is not 
there; the real, wonderful power and presence 
of God are not manifesting themselves through 
the body; there are relationships at home, or in 



Study Number Five. 99 

business, or in private that show when the veneer 
is taken off, that you are not real. The great 
thing for us all in this study of the Sermon on the 
Mount is to allow the principles and rules of Jesus 
to soak right straight down into our very make- 
up. It would be like a baptism of light to let these 
teachings of Jesus soak us through and through 
until we are incandescent. 

(2) The Proverbial Maxim of Reasonable- 
ness. Our Lord's use of this proverb is posi- 
tive, not negative. He said, "Do to men what 
you would like them to do to you." A very dif- 
ferent thing from, "Don't do to other people 
what you don't want them to do to you." What 
would I like other people to do to me? Jesus 
says, "Well, don't wait; do it to them." I would 
like people to think of me as I really am before 
God. Well, think of them like that. I would 
really like people to give me credit for the gener- 
ous motives I have. Well, give them credit for 
having them. I would really like that people 
should not pass harsh judgments on me, but that 
they should always understand that the one great 
motive of my life is to do them good. Well, have 
that attitude towards them. That is a maxim 
that Jesus wants us to have by us. 

It is commonly used the other way, you find 



ioo The Sermon on the Mount. 

it even in newspapers, "Don't do to others what 
you don't want them to do to you." But look at 
it the other way, "Do to other people as you wish 
them to do to you." If I have a feeling that I 
would like that person to pray for me ; well, pray 
for that person. The measure of my growth in 
grace is my attitude towards others, and the Holy 
Ghost will kindle my imagination to picture many 
things I would like them to do to me ; that is His 
way of telling you what to do to them. "Love 
your neighbor as yourself." 

The devil comes as an angel of light and says, 
"You must not think about yourself." Well, if 
you don't, what can you make of that statement ? 
The Holy Ghost will make you think about your- 
self. His only way of educating me when I am 
right with Him as to how to deal with other per- 
sons is making me picture what I would like those 
other persons to do to me, and then I go and do 
it to them. That is our Lord's measure for prac- 
tical ethical conduct all through the Sermon on 
the Mount. No wonder men want to say His 
principles don't apply to this life, but to a future 
dispensation; but let us begin to work them out 
now. i 

(3) The Principal Meaning of Revelation. 
The principal meaning of revelation is that the 



Study Number Five. ioi 

law of God may be incarnated in the believer — 
"Written epistles known and read of all men." 
This is the law that came through the prophets; 
for what purpose ? That it might be manifested 
in your lives. 

Jesus Christ came to make the great laws and 
principles of God incarnated in human life; not 
in good human life, but in bad human life. That 
is the miracle of Jesus Christ's grace, He did not 
put these things up as standards for us to come 
up to; He puts us in the place where He can re- 
make us, and put the principles in us, and enable 
us to work them out by His guidance. 



Study Number Six 

MATTHEW SEVEN. 

A. TWO GATES, TWO WAYS. 

Matthew 7:13, 14. 

1. "All Noble Things are Difficult.' 

2. "My Utmost for the Highest." 

3. "A stoot heart tae a' stae brae.' 

B. TEST YOUR TEACHERS. 

1. Possibility of Pretense. 

Matthew 7 : 15. 

2. Place of Patience. 

Matthew 7:16. 

3. Principle of Performance. 

Matthew 7 : 17, 18. 

4. Power of Publicity. 

Matthew 7 : 19, 20. 

C. APPEARANCE AND REALITY. 

1. Recognize Men Without Labels. 

Matthew 7 : 21. 

2. Remedy Mongers. 

Matthew 7 : 22. 

3. Retributive Measures. 

Matthew 7 : 23. 

D. THE TWO BUILDERS. 

1. Spiritual Castles. 

Matthew 7 : 24. 

2. Supreme Crisis. 

Matthew 7 : 25. 

3. Suspicious Conditions. 

Matthew 7:26. 

4. Supreme Catastrophe. 

Matthew 7 : 27. 

5. Scriptural Concentration. 



STUDY NUMBER SIX. 
Matthew 7 

The vital distinction between warning and 
threatening is just the difference between God 
and the devil. God never threatens, the devil 
never warns. Warning is a great, arresting 
statement of God's, inspired by His love and pa- 
tience. The more you brood over that, the more 
you will find it throws a flood of light on the pas- 
sages of the Old Testament in which God's warn- 
ings seem to be very strange, and of the New 
Testament where the statements of Jesus are so 
vivid, such as in Matthew 23. 

Always remember that both the voice of God 
and of Jesus are divine voices, not human; there 
is no element of personal vindictiveness in them, 
no question of holding it, "If you don't do this, the 
consequences will fall on you." It is the great, 
patient love of God that puts the warnings, as 
much as to say, "Not this way." "The way of 

105 



106 The Sermon on the Mount. 

transgressors is hard," go behind that statement 
in your imagination, God is almost tender as He 
cannot make it easy; and God has made it diffi- 
cult to go wrong, especially for His children. 

A. Two Gates, Two Ways. (Matt. 7:13, 
HO 

Our Lord is using here an allegory that was 
perfectly familiar to all the people of His day, 
and He lifts it by His inspiration to embody His 
patient warning. Our Lord continually used 
proverbs and sayings that were familiar to His 
hearers, and put an altogether new meaning into 
them; and we now take three phrases that are 
quite familiar to us and which embody our Lord's 
thought. 

(1) "All Noble Things are Difficult." Our 
Lord warns, in Matthew 7:13, 14, that the devout 
life of a disciple is not a dream, but a decided dis- 
cipline which calls for the use of all our powers. 
Note that no amount of determination can give 
me the new life of God, that is a gift; but the 
point of determination comes in letting that 
new life work itself out according to Christ's 
standard. We are always in danger of con- 
founding what we can do and what we cannot do. 
At the beginning we try to save ourselves, we 



Study Number Six. 107 

try to sanctify ourselves, we try to give ourselves 
the Holy Spirit; all those things are utterly im- 
possible. The only way we can get salvation, 
get sanctification, and get the Holy Spirit is by 
receiving them as gifts. The other snare is that 
we try to make out that God must make us "walk 
in the light." God does not, I must do the walk- 
ing, He gives me the power to walk, but I must 
see that I use the power. So you find the con- 
fusion continually recurs, our trying to do what 
God alone can do, and then trying to make out 
that God will do what only we can do. Our 
Lord here in these warnings has indicated what 
we have to do, He has put the power and the 
life in us, He fills us with the Holy Spirit, now 
we have to work it out ; that is, we have to realize 
that this noble life is gloriously difficult, not a 
difficulty that makes us faint and cave in, but a 
difficulty that rouses us up to overcome it. 

(2) "My Utmost for the Highest." Our 
Lord emphasizes the need for us to keep our minds 
fixed on the straight way, viz., as a disciple I will 
do my utmost as a proof that I appreciate God's 
utmost for me. How did Jesus live a holy life? 
He lived it by sacrificing Himself to His Father. 
How did He talk holy talking? By sacrificing 
His intellect to His Father. How did He work 



108 The Sermon on the Mount. 

holy working? By submitting His will to His 
Father. I have to use my utmost endeavors to 
do the same thing, and if I have the life of God I 
can do it. The motto over our side of the Gate 
of Life is, "All God's commands I can obey." 
Jesus, in John 14, puts that as the test of disciple- 
ship, "If you love me, you will keep my command- 
ments/' and you learn never to allow / cannot 
to creep in. "Oh, I am no saint, I cannot do 
this," — those things must never come in, because 
if they do, we are a disgrace to Jesus Christ. "My 
utmost for the highest." Do I so appreciate the 
marvelous salvation of Jesus in saving and sanc- 
tifying me and filling me with the Holy Spirit that 
I do my utmost to be worthy of Him ? 

(3) "A stoot heart tae a' stae hrae" (a 
strong heart to a difficult hill). In these verses 
our Lord warns us that the Christian life is a holy 
life, and that means we must not substitute the 
word happy. (Happiness we certainly will have, 
but it is a consequence of holiness.) Our Lord 
continually warns, without putting it in so many 
words, that we must never get off on the idea, 
which is exceedingly prevalent nowadays, of 
what we may safely call "the gospel of tempera- 
ment," viz., that we have to be happy and bright. 
All those are effects, they are not causes. Im- 



Study Number Six. 109 

mediately you make that the dominant character- 
istic of your life, "I am determined I will be happy 
and joyful," it will all go from you, because those 
things are not causes, they are not objects, they 
are consequences, things that follow without striv- 
ing after them. Our Lord insists that we keep 
at one point, our eyes fixed on the one place, the 
strait gate and the narrow way, which means in 
my life, pure, holy living, and I will have happi- 
ness. 

Note what our Lord says in the way of warn- 
ing about worry in John 14; for instance, the 
words "Let not" are a command, and the words 
in practical Christianity mean "Worry is wicked." 
If you are going to keep this strong heart that 
God has given you to the difficult braes in life, 
you have continually to watch that one thing. 
You remember in the first parable our Lord gave, 
He said that "the cares of this life will choke my 
word in you," and you will find it is not the devil 
that first switches folks off Christ's way, it is the 
ordinary, steep difficulties of daily life; difficulties 
connected with money, with food, with clothing 
and situations. Remember Jesus Christ's warn- 
ing that these things will choke all He puts in. 

Look back on your own life, we have each had 
a place where the little worries have blotted God's 



no The Sermon on the Mount. 

face out, enfeebled our hearts and made us sorry 
and humiliated before Him, much more so than 
the times when we felt the temptation to sin. The 
temptation to sin finds something that makes us 
face it with vigor and earnestness, but the cares 
of this life, the braes, or difficulties, require the 
stout heart that God gives. 

The whole summing up of this first great 
warning is twofold : it is easy to drift a little way, 
but it is easier to direct our steps in His way. 
Our Lord uses the illustration in Matthew it, 
"Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for 
my yoke is easy and my burden is light," It 
Seems amazingly difficult to put the yoke of Christ 
on, but immediately you do, it makes everything 
easy. It is much easier at the beginning appar- 
ently just simply to drift and say, "Oh, I can't"; 
but immediately you do, you find, blessed be the 
name of God, your heart and body and soul say. 
"I have the easiest way after all." Happiness 
and all these things attend, they are not my aim, 
my aim is the Lord Jesus Christ, and He has 
showered the hundredfold more on me all the 
way along. 

B. Test Your Teachers. (Matt. 7:15-20.) 

Jesus warns His disciples to test preachers and 

teachers by their fruit. There are two ways of 



Study Number Six. hi 

testing by fruit, one is by the fruit in the life of 
the preacher, and the other is by the fruit in the 
life of the doctrine. I may have a perfectly beau- 
tiful life in its fruits, but I may be teaching a doc- 
trine which, if logically worked out, will produce 
the devil's fruit in other lives. Jesus says, "Test 
your teachers." 

Without His warnings we are always cap- 
tivated. It is the easiest thing in the world for 
us to be captivated by a beautiful life and say, 
"Now what that beautiful life teaches must be 
right." Jesus says, "Be careful, test your teach- 
er by the fruit." The other side is just as true, 
that you may have teachers teaching beautiful 
truth whose doctrine in its fruit will be magnifi- 
cent, but the fruit in their own lives is rotten. 
If we see a man with a beautiful life, we say his 
doctrine must be right, but not necessarily so; 
then we say because a man teaches the right thing, 
therefore his life is all right, not necessarily so. 
Test the doctrine by its fruit, and test the teacher 
by his fruit. 

(i) Possibility of Pretence. (7:15.) Je- 
sus would have us know that there are people who 
come clothed in the right doctrine, but inwardly 
their spirit is the spirit of Satan. The very al- 
lowing of my mind to think that it is possible to 



ii2 The Sermon on the Mount. 

pretend is quite sufficient warning. Jesus says, 
"Beware of the possibility of pretence." Im- 
mediately the disciples' eyes are off Jesus, pious 
pretending follows instantly. i John 1 : 7 is the 
essential condition for all saints. You find, as 
you study the Sermon on the Mount, that you are 
badgered by the Spirit of God from every stand- 
point but one, and it is the standard of a child 
depending on God. Immediately we depend on 
anything else, there comes in this possibility of 
pretence, pious pretence, not hypocritical; we are 
dealing with pretence, the desperately sincere ef- 
fort to be right when we know we are not. A 
hypocrite is something infinitely more than that, 
a hypocrite is one who tries and succeeds in liv- 
ing a twofold life for his own ends. Our Lord 
is describing dangerous teachers here. 

(2) Place of Patience. (7: 16.) Our Lord 
in some cases would have us bide our time. This 
warning is against over-zealousness on the part 
of heresy-hunters. An incident in the life of 
our Lord points out what I mean. John and 
another disciple came to Jesus and said: "We 
saw a man casting out devils, and as he did not 
come with us we forbade him." Jesus said, 
"Don't, no man can do these things and speak 
lightly of me." Take heed that we do not make 



Study Number Six. 113 

carnal suspicion take the place of the discernment 
of the Spirit. Fruit, and fruit alone, is the test, 
not the disciples' fancy. If I see distinctly in a 
minister or a Sunday-school teacher or a fellow- 
Christian the fruit in the life showing itself like 
thistles, then Jesus said, "Now you know perfectly 
well there is the wrong root there, you do not 
gather a thistle off any other root than a thistle- 
root" ; but it is quite possible to mistake in the 
winter time a rose tree for a weed, unless you are 
thoroughly expert in judging, so there is a place 
for patience, and the Lord would have us' heed it. 
Wait for the fruit to manifest itself and don't 
be guided by fancy. It is an easy business to get 
alarmed and to persuade myself that my convic- 
tion is the standard of Christ. Immediately I 
do, I condemn everyone to perdition who does not 
agree with me, I am obliged to, because my con- 
viction has taken in me the place of Jesus Christ. 
God's Book never says, "Walk in the light of my 
conviction," but "Walk in the light of the Lord." 
You have to make a vital distinction between the 
people who object to my way of presenting God's 
Gospel and the people who object to God's Gospel. 
There are ever so many people who object to my 
way of presenting the truth, but they certainly 
do not object to God making them holy, and I 



ii4 The Sermon on the Mount, 
have to make the distinction clear, I have to re- 
member that the difficulty in presenting the truth 
has been with me, not with God. 

(3) Principle of Performance. (7:17,18.) 
If I wish the performances of my life to be stead- 
ily holy, I must be holy in the principle of my 
life. If I am to bring forth good fruit, I must 
have a good root. Just as it is possible for a 
man in a flying-machine to imitate a bird, so it 
is possible to imitate the fruit of the Spirit. The 
vital difference is the same in both, the aeroplane 
cannot persist, it can only fly spasmodically, there 
is no principle of life behind ; and my imitation of 
the Spirit requires certain things that keep me 
from the public gaze and then I can imitate fairly 
well ; but if I am going to bring forth the perform- 
ance and fruit that is right, I must have the prin- 
ciple inside right. I must know what it is to be 
born again of the Holy Ghost, and sanctified, and 
filled with the Holy Spirit, then my performance 
will bring the fruit. Fruit is clearly expounded 
in the Epistles and is quite distinct from gifts or 
from the manifest seal of God on His own Word. 

(4) Power of Publicity. (7: 19, 20,) Our 
Lord in His own life lived most publicly. When 
standing before Caiaphas He said, "I spake noth- 
ing in private" (John 18: 20), and our Lord here 



Study Number Six. 115 

applies the same test of publicity to His disciples. 
All through the life of our Lord the one thing 
that made His enemies mad was the manner in 
which He did things, they were annoyed at His 
miracles because they manifested His public 
power. People are annoyed at the same things 
to-day, they are annoyed at public testimony. Je- 
sus makes publicity the test, that is, there is no 
use saying, "Oh, yes, I live a holy life, but I don't 
say anything about it" ; then you certainly don't, 
for the two go together. Our Lord warns that 
the men who won't be conspicuous as His dis- 
ciples will be made to be conspicuous as His ene- 
mies. 

Whenever a thing has its root in the heart of 
God, it wants to be public, it wants to get out, it 
must do things in the external and the open, and 
Jesus Christ not only encouraged it, but He in- 
sisted on it, both for bad and for good. Things 
must be dragged out, it is God's law, men cannot 
hide what they really are, and if they are His 
disciples, it will be publicly portrayed. 

Our Lord said, in Matthew 10, that men like 
wolves will want to devour you if you publicly 
perform or testify, but do not hide your light un- 
der a bushel for fear of wolfish men who can only 
destroy your body, but be careful that you do 



n6 The: Sermon on the Mount. 

not go contrary to your duty and have your soul 
destroyed; be as "wise as serpents and harmless 
as doves." That warning of the Lord needs to 
come back here, that we have simply to wait in 
patience" ; if there are certain men and women who 
are not living in the public, conspicuous lives as 
the saints of God, as sure as God is on His throne, 
the inevitable principle must work, the public ex- 
posure of them. If we are not publicly conspicu- 
ous in the good, we will be publicly conspicuous 
in the bad. 

C. Appearance and Reality. (Matt. 7: 
21-23.) 

Our Lord here makes the test of goodness not 
only good intention but carrying out God's will. 
(1) Recognize Men Without Labels. (7:21.) 
Human nature is very fond of labels, that means 
the counterfeit of confession. It is so easy to be 
branded with labels, so easy in a certain stage to 
wear a bonnet or a ribbon, it is much easier to do 
that than to confess. Our Lord Jesus never 
used the word testimony, He used a much more 
testing word, He used the word confess. Our 
Lord said that the test of goodness was confes- 
sion by doing the will of God. Therefore if the 
disciple is to discern between the man with the 



Study Number Six. 117 

label and the man with the goods, he must have 
the spirit of discernment, viz., the Holy Spirit. 
The label and the goods ought to go together, but 
our Lord is warning His disciples that there are 
times when they do not. A good many of us 
before we get right with God like to say, "Oh, 
yes, I quite agree with that, I don't think anyone 
ought to wear a badge. " Jesus says, "If you 
don't confess me before men, I will not confess 
you before my father," and immediately you con- 
fess you must have a badge, and if you don't put 
one on yourself, they will put one on you. Watch 
what Jesus says about discipleship, you must be 
conspicuous, and the old cunning, carnal mind 
comes in and says we must live the holy life and 
say nothing about it. That is absolutely con- 
trary to the sp : rit of the New Testament. Our 
Lord here is warning that it is possible for a man 
to carry the "label" without the goods, that is, it 
is possible for men to wear the badge of being 
"my disciple" while they are not. 

(2) Remedy Mongers. (7:22.) Our Lord 
here warns against those who utilize His words 
and His ways to remedy the evils of men while 
they are disloyal to Jesus. "Many will say to me 
in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied 
in Thy name ? and in Thy name have cast out de- 



n8 The Sermon on the Mount. 

vils ? and in Thy name have done many wonder- 
ful works ?" Not one word of confession of Je- 
sus, one thing only, and that is, we have preached 
Him as a remedy, like quack preachers. The 
test of discipleship, as Jesus is dealing with it in 
this chapter, is fruit in goodly character, and the 
disciple is warned not to be blinded by the fact 
that God honors His Word even when it is 
preached from contention and the wrong motive. 
(See Phil, i : 15.) We have all had puzzles with 
the thing that is indicated in this statement of 
Jesus, we start out with the honest, plain, simple 
truth that the labels and the goods must go to- 
gether, they ought to go together, but Jesus is 
warning here that sometimes they get severed, 
and you sometimes find cases in which God honors 
His Word and the people who preach it are not 
living a right life. Now He says if you are go- 
ing to judge the preachers, judge them by their 
fruit. He gave the same warning in Luke 10 to 
His own disciples. They were delighted because 
the very devils were subject to them, and Jesus 
said, "Don't rejoice in that I gave you power, but 
rejoice that your names are written in the Book 
of Life." We are back to the one point — right 
relationship to Jesus Christ, unsullied in every 
way, in every detail-, private and public. 



Study Number Six. 119 

(3) Retributive Measures. (7:23.) In 
these solemn words Jesus states that He has to 
confess to some Bible expositors, some prophetic 
students, some workers of miracles, that they 
must depart from Him for they have twisted the 
ways of God and made them unequal, that is the 
meaning of the word "iniquity" (twisted out of 
the straight). We are continually perplexed by 
people who are preaching the right thing and 
who are proving that God is blessing the preach- 
ing, and yet all the time the Spirit of God is warn- 
ing, "No ! No ! ! No ! ! !" Only as we rely on and 
recognize the Spirit of God do we discern how 
Jesus Christ's warnings work. Never trust the 
best man or woman you ever met, trust only the 
Lord Jesus Christ. That holds good all the 
way along, "Lean not to your own understand- 
ing, put not your trust in princes, put not your 
trust in anyone." Have you ever noticed that 
every (not some) character in God's Book, when 
that character is taken as a guide, leads away 
from God? We are never told to follow in all 
the footsteps of the saints, we are only told to 
follow in the footsteps of the saints in so far as 
they have obeyed God. "Keep right with me, 
keep in the light," says Jesus, and you have fel- 
lowship with one another, that is with everyone 



120 The Sermon on the Mount. 

else in the light. All our panics, moral, intellec- 
tual and spiritual, come just on that point, when- 
ever we take our eyes off Jesus Christ, we get 
startled. "There is another one gone down, I 
did think he would stand right." "Look at Me/' 
says Jesus. 

D. The Two Builders. (Matt. 7: 24-29.) 
The emphasis of our Lord is laid here on hear- 
ing and doing these sayings of mine. It would 
be a profitable study if we would hunt up what 
Jesus has to say about hearing. "He that hath 
ears to hear" — it would throw an amount of light 
on how I have heard what He said. 

(1) Spiritual Castles. (7:24.) Our build- 
ings must be conspicuous, and the test of the spir- 
itual building is not its fair beauty but its founda- 
tion and bulwarks. Look at the most beautiful 
spiritual fabrics which are raised in the shape of 
books and lives, beautiful and full of the finest 
diction and statements spiritual and good; but 
when the test comes, down they go. What is 
the test? They have not been built on "these 
sayings of mine," that is, they are built altogether 
in the air, with no foundation. 

(2) Supreme Crisis. (7:25.) Every 
spiritual castle will be tested by a threefold storm : 
rain, flood and wind — the world, the flesh, and 



Study Number Six. 121 

the devil, and it will only stand if it is founded on 
these sayings of mine. 

(3) Suspicious Conditions. (7:26.) Every 
spiritual fabric that is built with the sayings of 
Jesus instead of being founded on them, Jesus 
calls a building by foolish men. "He that hear- 
eth these sayings of mine and doeth them." There 
is a tendency in everyone of us to appreciate with 
our intellects and even with our spirits and hearts 
the teachings of Jesus, but if we refuse to do 
them, everything we build will go by the founda- 
tion when the test comes. Paul applies this when 
he says, "If I build hay, wood or stubble, gold 
or silver, it has all to be tested by the supreme 
test" 

(4) Supreme Catastrophe. (7: 27.) All 
that I build will be tested supremely and it will 
tumble in a fearful disaster unless it is built on 
the sayings of Jesus. It is an easy business to 
build with the sayings of Jesus, to sling texts of 
Scripture together and build them into any kind 
of fabric you like. Jesus did not say he that 
builds with my statements, but he that builds on 
them the character of home life, of business life. 
Did you ever notice the repulsion that the healthy 
saint and the healthy worldling have against any 
man or woman who tries to build with the state- 



122 The: Sermon on the: Mount. 

ments of Jesus? You will find that God brings 
the pagan and the saint before this tremendous 
standard, "What about your actions?'' These 
things are quoted in your office, in your homes, 
but how do you work them out? That is what 
Jesus is saying, it is only when it is built on my 
statements, that is, our Lord makes no allowance 
for having some compartments holy and other 
compartments not, the whole thing must be radi- 
cally built on the foundation. 

(5) Scriptural Concentration. (7:28,29.) 
The summing up is a descriptive note inspired by 
the Spirit of God on the way in which people 
who heard Jesus had forgotten everything else 
but His doctrine. Its application for us is not 
what would Jesus do, but what did Jesus say. As 
I concentrate on what He said, so I can stake my 
immortal soul on those statements. 

The: End. 



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